<![CDATA[Rising affective and issue-based polarization has become one of the most consequential features of contemporary political life, and social media is widely implicated as an accelerant of this trend. While a substantial literature has examined this relationship in established Western democracies, evidence from emerging democracies—characterized by weaker institutional trust, higher reliance on closed messaging platforms, and more volatile party systems—remains comparatively fragmented. This article synthesizes recent theoretical and empirical work to examine how social media use shapes political polarization in emerging democratic contexts across Latin America, Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and post-Soviet states. Drawing on a structured narrative synthesis of studies published primarily between 2021 and 2026, the review develops a conceptual framework linking algorithmic curation, selective exposure, affective cueing, and misinformation to two forms of polarization, moderated by institutional context. The findings indicate that messaging applications such as WhatsApp function differently from feed-based platforms in emerging democracies, that algorithmic amplification interacts with weak media literacy to intensify affective hostility, and that polarization effects are conditioned by regime type and party-system volatility rather than being uniform across contexts. The article concludes by identifying priority areas for future comparative research and platform governance in the Global South.]]>
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