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In a current article, state-owned tabloid YLE is promoting a Study in the making on the topic of affective polarization (AP) within the Swedish-Finnish population.
Länk till källan.
According to YLE, Dr. Strandberg at Åbo Akademi wants to test if Swedish-speaking Finns are divided by Affective Polarization, which is based on two concepts: affective and polarization.
Affective is a psychological concept meaning expressing emotions (Merriam – Webster). Note that emotions are interacting with, but not the same as, cognition. Emotions are general to mammals and operate functions like fight – flight responses as well as facial feedback and forward reactions (Österberg, 2001). Cognition, on the other hand, allows epistemic and instrumental rational thinking (Stanovich, 2011, 2016; Toplak, West, and Stanovich, 2013), as well as disjunctive reasoning (Pinker, 2011; Stanovich, 2009).
Polarization is:
“the act of dividing something, especially something that contains different people or opinions, into two completely opposing groups” (Cambridge dictionary).In a two-party political system, Iyengar & Westwood (2015) defines Affective Polarization as “the tendency of people identifying as [alternative 1] or (alternative 2] to view opposing partisans negatively and copartisans positively” (In Iyengar et al. 2019).
At Its peak, Affective Polarization may result in partisan animus, where animus refers to:
“a usually prejudiced and often spiteful or malevolent ill will” (Merriam-Webster).The criteria in the current study are immigration, sexual minorities, and environmental issues, all three at the top of the ranks for Finnish politicians.
“– Det som har varit överraskande för mig var att det väldigt tydligt finns affektivt polariserade människor i Svenskfinland”, säger Strandberg.Strandberg argue that Affective Polarization has a very clear manifestation in Swedish-Finland. Even so, there's no references to prove his proposal.
In the midst of the Holocene, people started to migrate to the area we now call Fennoscandia. From the Ural mountains came nomads, and from the west and South came people from Europe (Lamnidis, 2018).
A remarkable trade culture based on entrepreneurial thinking, which is about the “knowledge structures” that people use to make judgments and decisions that involve the evaluation, creation and growth of opportunities (Cacciolatti och Lee, 2015; Mitchell et al. 2002; Österberg, 2012), emerged in the coastal area in what i now call the Swedish kingdom. It was called Roden and stretched from Hamrångefjärden i Gästrikland to Kalmar in the south. The administrative center was Tiundaland (~todays Uppsala/Uppland). Together with Attundaland and Fjädrundaland (later Fjärhundraland) it was called Svitjod.
On the other side of Gulf of Bothnia was Satakunda (today divided between Satakunta and Birkaland). The Chieftains of Satakunda applied to become part of the Svearna's sea-trading network (Klinge, 1985). Note. Satakunda has the same meaning as Tiundaland.
1240. Holmgård (Novgorod) declared independence from Svitjod. That became a starting point for a long-standing conflict between Svitjod and Novgorod, which transformed into a conflict between the Swedish kingdom and what later became Russia.
The Swedish kingdom expanded into the eastern part, and at least 16 trading posts were founded by the Svearna, which today constitute Finland's 16 largest cities.
1581. The eastern part of the Swedish kingdom was crowned a grand duchy.
1808. Russia invaded the eastern part of its arch enemy. 1809, Russia started an occupation which lasted for 108 years.
In the eastern part of the former eastern part of the Swedish kingdom lived tribes who spoke different Uralic languages.
~1863 (according to many Finns I have spoken to). In order to counteract the relation between the people around the Gulf of Bothnia, tsar Alexander (1818 – 1881) decided to impose another official language. For some reason, he didn't choose Russian, which would have been the obvious choice, but one of the Uralic languages.
1917. The people: (1) declared independence from Russia, and (2) the republic of Finland.
~1925. The second, Uralic, language reached break even. That coincided with the language strife; Uralic-speaking kids attacked kids who spoke Finland's and Sweden's common trade language.
And here's an important note. Back in the days, scholars believed that agriculture explained culture. Nowadays, many agree that language explains culture (Reich, 2019).
Therefore, Finland is formally a divided area; the Swedish-Finns in the south and the South-west where most Finns live and the Uralic-Finns in the north and northeast where the population is sparse.
Finnish neuro-scientists testify that they prefer to sample subjects for their research from people in the north. That's because those people are biologically more homogeneous compared to people in the south and south-east. And according to Mark Pagel, a professor of biological anthropology, the uralic part of Finland is marked by tribalism tribal (Pagel, 2019, 44 minutes in).
People in the south and southeast of Finland are more diverse genetically and culturally, as well as remaining closer to Svearna's entrepreneurial thinking.
Is Affective Polarization manifested within the group of Swedish-Finns?
I haven't seen Dr Strandberg's data or results, but it sounds unlikely. From a rational point of view, Finland's polarization is manifested between Swedish-finns and Ural-finns, where the latter is more unwilling to accept people from outside of Finland.
For example, the university of Helsingfors, founded in 1640 by Swedish Queen Kristina (1626 – 1689), promotes itself by mainly using Ural-Finnish, which is a marker for tribalism (Pagel, 2019). The management tell people that if they are going to work at the University of Helsingfors, they have to learn Uralic-Finnish.
In contrast, most universities around the Globe, including those in Sweden, are using general academic lingo – English.
And a recent study by E2 show that about 40 % of the people who arrive to Finland experience discrimination (YLE, 2022). One Odd thing occurred during the presentation of the study; the researchers didn't use the general academic language, that is English, but Ural-Finnish!!? And when questioned about it, they rationalized a very strange explanation. That's a confirmation of Dr. Pagel's claim about tribalism, and implies, that even though politicians urge people to move to Finland, those who arrive aren't really welcome. But that's only an expression among those who mainly speak Ural-Finnish. The Swedish-Finns are used to interacting on both sides so to speak, they are open-minded, and welcoming.
Ergo. When it comes to immigration, I find Dr. Strandberg's hypothesized claim about Affective Polarization as a within-group variation in Sweden-Finland unlikely, but more likely, if there's a case for AP, it's manifested between Finlands two main cultures.
Epilog. Finland has issues with population growth. A recent study suggests that the mortality/nativity-ratio point to a shrinking population (Gietel-Basten et al. 2022). Therefore, Finland needs to attract people from outside the country. That means that migration to Finland is crucial. Because Sweden and Finland share the same language, the rational argument would be to attract people from Sweden.
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