Related papers: Ideological and Temporal Components of Network Pol…

Political polarization in online social platforms is a rapidly growing phenomenon worldwide. Despite their relevance to modern-day politics, the structure and dynamics of polarized states in digital spaces are still poorly understood. We…

Members of different political groups not only disagree about issues but also dislike and distrust each other. While social media can amplify this emotional divide -- called affective polarization by political scientists -- there is a lack…

Political polarization appears to be on the rise, as measured by voting behavior, general affect towards opposing partisans and their parties, and contents posted and consumed online. Research over the years has focused on the role of the…

Does polarization online reflect the state of polarization in society? We study ideological positions and attitudes on several issues in France, a country with documented issue nonalignment. We compare distributions on X/Twitter with a…

Social media platforms significantly influence ideological divisions by enabling users to select information that aligns with their beliefs and avoid opposing viewpoints. Analyzing approximately 47 million Facebook posts, this study…

Ensuring legislative accountability in multi-party systems requires quantitative tools that reveal actual voting behavior beyond formal party affiliations. We present a network-based framework for analyzing parliamentary dynamics at…

This study investigates affective polarization among Swedish politicians on Twitter from 2021 to 2023, including the September 2022 parliamentary election. Analyzing over 25,000 tweets and employing large language models (LLMs) for…

Optimism about the Internet's potential to bring the world together has been tempered by concerns about its role in inflaming the 'culture wars'. Via mass selection into like-minded groups, online society may be becoming more fragmented and…

Polarization, defined as the emergence of sharply divided groups with opposing and often extreme views, is an increasingly prominent feature of modern societies. While many studies analyze this phenomenon in the context of single issues,…

Assessing political conversations in social media requires a deeper understanding of the underlying practices and styles that drive these conversations. In this paper, we present a computational approach for assessing online conversational…

Studying political activity on social media often requires defining and measuring political stances of users or content. Relevant examples include the study of opinion polarization, or the study of political diversity in online content…

Affective polarization, or, inter-party hostility, is increasingly recognized as a pervasive issue in democracies worldwide, posing a threat to social cohesion. The digital media ecosystem, now widely accessible and ever-present, has often…

The abundance of information on social media has reshaped public discussions, shifting attention to the mechanisms that drive online discourse. This study analyzes large-scale Twitter (now X) data from three global debates--Climate Change,…

We investigate the polarization of the German Twittersphere by extracting the main issues discussed and the signaled opinions of users towards those issues based on (re)tweets concerning trending topics. The dataset covers daily trending…

Political polarization plays a pivotal and potentially harmful role in a democracy. However, existing studies are often limited to a single country and one form of polarization, hindering a comprehensive understanding of the phenomena. Here…

Measuring the number of "likes" in Twitter and the number of bills voted in favor by the members of the Chilean Chambers of Deputies. We empirically study how signals of agreement in Twitter translates into cross-cutting voting during a…

Explanations of polarization often rely on one of the three mechanisms: homophily, bounded confidence, and community-based interactions. Models based on these mechanisms consider the lack of interactions as the main cause of polarization.…

The increasing polarization of online political discourse calls for computational tools that automatically detect and monitor ideological divides in social media. We introduce a minimally supervised method that leverages the network…

The rise of ideological divides in public discourse has received considerable attention in recent years. However, much of this research has been concentrated on Western democratic nations, leaving other regions largely unexplored. Here, we…

We examine partisan differences in the behavior, communication patterns and social interactions of more than 18,000 politically-active Twitter users to produce evidence that points to changing levels of partisan engagement with the American…