Political and social polarization is reshaping democracies across sub-Saharan Africa, hardening group identities, eroding civic trust, and fracturing the social fabric on which peaceful coexistence depends (Gyimah-Boadi, 2015; Cheeseman & Klaas, 2018). Yet one of the most consequential settings in which polarization is experienced, transmitted, and potentially reversed remains almost entirely unstudied: the family. This planning grant will build the conceptual, relational, and methodological foundations required to measure family-level polarization mechanisms at scale across four African countries, producing, for the first time, a validated cross-cultural toolkit that future large-scale quantitative research can deploy.
THE RESEARCH PROBLEM
The existing polarization literature overwhelmingly focuses on individual attitudes, elite behavior, and institutional dynamics, ranging from Iyengar and colleagues' foundational work on affective polarization (2019) to McCoy and Somer's comparative theory of pernicious polarization across eleven democracies (2019). Family systems are widely acknowledged as the primary site of political socialization (Greenstein, 1965; Hyman, 1959) yet are treated as background context rather than as an active unit of analysis. Warner, Colaner, and Park (2021) showed that increasing emotional polarization in families weakens the communication that helps family members get along despite their differences, but there are no reliable tools to measure this situation outside of Western political settings. Finkel and colleagues' political sectarianism framework (2020) identifies othering, aversion, and moralization as the most corrosive constellation of polarization dynamics, but the African family as a site where these dynamics play out has received no empirical attention. Existing African data sources (Afrobarometer, Varieties of Democracy, World Values Survey) capture individual or institutional attitudes and cannot tell us how families function as mechanisms of polarization transmission, buffering, or repair (Afrobarometer, 2022). This is the gap we propose to close.
THREE NOVEL CONSTRUCTS
Our framework introduces three constructs that together capture the family's role in the polarization chain and which form the target of this planning phase's instrument development work.
Family Conflict Recovery Capacity (FCRC) measures a household's ability to re-establish functional communication and relational warmth following politically triggered conflict. It captures whether families have the repair repertoire to recover from the political disagreement that all families experience. Drawing on Koerner and Fitzpatrick's (2002) foundational theory of family communication patterns, which shows that families develop relatively stable relational schemas that guide how conflict is managed and difference navigated, and on community engagement by our confirmed partners (Familia Juu in Kibra, Nairobi; Ukuthemba in Cape Town), we have preliminary evidence that families with strong FCRC develop localized norms for managing difference rather than suppressing it, and that these norms vary meaningfully across East African and Southern African family systems.
Shared Reality and Verification Norms (SRVN) captures the degree to which family members maintain common epistemic standards and shared ways of determining what is true together. This construct speaks directly to the disinformation ecologies of all four study countries, where politically motivated misinformation circulates through WhatsApp family groups before reaching any institutional fact-checker (Wasserman & Madrid-Morales, 2019). Drawing on Finkel and colleagues' framework (2020), SRVN distinguishes families that disagree politically but still reason together from those where political difference has collapsed shared standards of evidence entirely, the more dangerous and fragile condition for democratic functioning.
Family-to-Institution Trust Transfer (FITT) addresses the most consequential pathway from family dynamics to societal polarization. Afrobarometer data consistently shows that family trust is the most robust form of social trust in Africa, while institutional trust is fragile and declining across all four study countries (Afrobarometer, 2022). FITT asks: when and how does trust within the family system extend outward to public institutions, electoral commissions, courts, local government, and public health authorities, and when does it fail to do so? Drawing on the bonding-bridging-linking social capital framework (Putnam, 2000; Woolcock, 2001), we hypothesize that families with higher FCRC and SRVN scores maintain the psychological trust reserves that allow individuals to extend confidence to institutions even under electoral pressure.
THEORY OF CHANGE
Our theory of change is explicit and falsifiable: families with stronger capacities to recover from political conflict, maintain shared epistemic norms, and bridge trust toward public institutions exhibit greater bridging and linking social cohesion, which contributes to reduced societal polarization at scale. We make no claim that family-level dynamics are the dominant driver of polarization; elite political entrepreneurs, structural inequalities, media ecosystems, and institutional fragility all play important roles (McCoy & Somer, 2019). Our contribution is to open a rigorous empirical window on the family level that is currently absent from the African polarization literature and to produce the validated measurement tools that will allow future quantitative research and depolarization practitioners to work at this level for the first time.
WHY THESE SITES
Each of the four urban sentinel sites was selected because it embodies the kind of layered, lived polarization that existing measurement tools cannot adequately capture.
Kibra constituency in Nairobi (Kenya) is one of Kenya's most ethnically diverse and politically intense constituencies, home to the Luhya, Luo, Kikuyu, Kamba, and Nubian communities (Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, 2019), whose voting patterns, patron-client networks (Branch & Cheeseman, 2009), and inter-ethnic tensions have made it a recurring flashpoint in Kenyan electoral politics. It is also one of Nairobi's poorest constituencies, where the intersection of ethnic identity, poverty, and political mobilization creates an acute environment for studying how families navigate political differences across generational and ethnic lines.
Mitchell's Plain, located on Cape Town's Cape Flats in South Africa, has a different but just as important history of polarization. Built under apartheid in the 1970s as a forced relocation site for Coloured families displaced by the Group Areas Act, many from the demolished District Six community (Western, 1981; Seekings, 1991), it remains one of South Africa's largest townships with a population of approximately 310,000 (Statistics South Africa, 2022). A former stronghold of the United Democratic Front during the anti-apartheid struggle (Seekings, 2000), it now sits at the intersection of persistent racial inequality, ANC-DA political contestation, generational trauma from forced displacement, and ongoing community stresses. It is this layered complexity of racial categorization, political mobilization, and structural poverty across generations that makes it an essential site for studying how families carry and transmit political identity.
The Kinondoni district in Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) and the Rubaga division in Kampala (Uganda) round out the four-country study, allowing for comparisons across English-speaking East Africa and helping to confirm all three ideas in different
PLANNING PHASE METHODOLOGY: QUALITATIVE FOUNDATION FOR FUTURE MEASUREMENT
This planning phase is deliberately and explicitly qualitative. Its purpose is not to generate survey data; that is the work of the follow-on implementation grant. Its purpose is to ensure that the quantitative instruments deployed in that follow-on grant are culturally grounded, linguistically valid, and conceptually coherent across four distinct national contexts. This methodology is a standard and well-respected approach in cross-cultural measurement science: rigorous qualitative groundwork is the prerequisite for valid quantitative instruments (Squires, 2009; Creswell & Plano Clark, 2018).
The planning phase proceeds in five structured stages. In months 1 and 2, community co-design workshops at each sentinel site will bring together multi-generational family members, community leaders, and local partner organization staff to explore how FCRC, SRVN, and FITT manifest in local language, practice, and lived experience. These workshops will be conducted in local languages (Swahili in Kibra and Dar es Salaam; Afrikaans/isiXhosa/Zulu in Mitchell's Plain; and Luganda in Kampala) and will generate rich qualitative data of independent scholarly value, not as a pilot survey, but as construct mapping that grounds the measurement framework in authentic community epistemology.
In Month 2, a five-member cross-disciplinary advisory panel (comprising polarization researchers, African political scientists, community psychology experts, and measurement specialists) will review the construct specifications emerging from co-design workshops. In Month 3, professional bilingual translators will produce forward and back-translations of preliminary item pools into all four target languages, with reconciliation reviewed by the advisory panel. In months 3 and 4, we will conduct interviews with 6 to 8 households at each site (totaling 24 to 32 households) to check if the questionnaire items are understood as the researchers intended across different cultures, following the recommended sample sizes for testing in cross-cultural surveys. The present project is not a pilot study; it is instrument validation fieldwork. No statistical inference will be drawn from this sample.
From Month 5 to Month 9, we will carefully examine all the workshop transcripts, recordings and notes from cognitive interviews, and memos about translations to create updated and culturally appropriate instrument specifications, a complete research plan, a registered analysis plan for the next study, and a funding application aiming for $2–2.5 million for future support. The qualitative data from workshops will also be analyzed independently for publication, generating two to three academic outputs in their own right.
ETHICAL APPROACH
All work will receive ethics clearance from UWC's Senate Research Ethics Committee and equivalent national IRB bodies in each country. Because family data on sensitive political issues can be delicate, we have put in place specific protections: we will get individual consent from each family member instead of just one consent for the whole household, check for any conflicts and have a plan to refer people to support services, hold community meetings at each location before sharing any findings, and ensure that our fieldworkers have support when working in challenging family situations. We will preregister our theoretical framework and analysis plan on the Open Science Framework prior to any data collection and will deposit all instruments, codebooks, and anonymized data in a FAIR-compliant open repository under Creative Commons licensing, in line with TWCF's open science requirements.
PARTNERS AND STAKEHOLDER ENGAGEMENT
Community partnerships are structurally essential. X and X (Kibra, Kenya) and the Ukuthemba (Mitchell's Plain, South Africa) have confirmed participation with letters of support and have existing relationships with multi-generational families in both sites. Provisional partnerships with Tumaini Centre (Kinondoni, Tanzania) and Kulika Uganda (Rubaga, Uganda) are under active consideration and shall be confirmed, or we shall get alternatives before the kickoff of the project; contingency options at the University of Dar es Salaam Community Engagement Unit and Makerere University's Faculty of Social Sciences have been identified. Policy stakeholders have been mapped in each country: Kenya’s National Cohesion and Integration Commission, South Africa's Human Rights Commission, Tanzania's Ministry of Community Development, and Uganda's Equal Opportunities Commission, with structured engagement planned throughout the planning period. Dissemination will span peer-reviewed open-access journals (targeting Political Psychology, Journal of Peace Research, and African Affairs), country-specific policy briefs in English and relevant local languages, community feedback sessions at each site, and a short documentary format for broader public engagement.
THREE CORE INNOVATIONS
This project makes three contributions to the LLPW knowledge base. First, it uses the family system as the main focus for studying polarization in Africa, which is a big change from the usual focus on individuals and institutions. Second, it will produce the first cross-culturally validated toolkit for measuring family polarization in sub-Saharan Africa, filling a gap that existing Western-designed instruments (feeling thermometers, partisan identification measures, and social distance scales) cannot fill in political landscapes characterized by ethnic coalition politics, extended family structures, and post-colonial institutional histories (Weghorst & Lindberg, 2013). Third, it sees the planning stage as a way to create knowledge: the community workshops and interviews will produce valuable insights that will be published together with the work on validating the measurement tool.
CLOSING
Polarization is often felt most acutely not in parliament or on social media, but at the kitchen table in the tension between a parent and child who voted differently, in the WhatsApp family group where contested political news circulates without challenge, and in the quiet decision not to bring politics up at a family gathering anymore. In communities like Kibra and Mitchell's Plain, where those tensions carry the additional weight of ethnic mobilization, forced displacement, and generations of political struggle, understanding how families hold together or break apart under polarization pressure is not an academic abstraction. It is a question with direct consequences for the health of democracy across the region. This planning grant will give us the cultural knowledge, the validated tools, and the research infrastructure to begin answering it rigorously and to make those tools available to the global polarization research community.

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