Accountability involves a certain degree of comparison. In theories of fiscal federalism, individuals benchmark taxes and expenditures against those in other jurisdictions and in theories of economic voting individuals benchmark national or regional economic conditions against those in other domestic or international jurisdictions. However, recent work in the area questions this literature and its premises: if all sorts of biases condition regular accountability processes, we may expect them to operate in individuals’ benchmarking exercises, too. In this paper we explore a particular source of bias in regional benchmarking, namely individuals' attitudes towards specific territories. We argue that the effect of benchmarking between regions upon incumbents’ accountability is contingent on the specific region against which outcomes are compared. Historical developments within nations may separate regions into rival communities. A rival community may turn into an out-group community when its members persistently prompt negative sentiments among the members of the in-group. Our main hypothesis is that the effect of benchmarking will work more prominently when benchmarking is against an out-group community as compared to neutral communities. We test this affective territorial polarization hypothesis using a benchmarking experiment conducted in representative samples of several Spanish regions. We treat individuals in each region with information that compares negatively their economic management to: a) the national average; b) a region that generates neutral feelings to the individual respondent; and c) an out-group region for the individual respondent. We then test whether high levels of affective territorial polarization weaken the role of benchmarking upon regional accountability.