Related papers: Embedding-based Qualitative Analysis of Polarizati…
Between February 14, 2019 and March 4, 2019, a terrorist attack in Pulwama, Kashmir followed by retaliatory airstrikes led to rising tensions between India and Pakistan, two nuclear-armed countries. In this work, we examine polarizing…
This paper addresses polarization quantification, particularly as it pertains to the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court and his subsequent confirmation with the narrowest margin since 1881. Republican (GOP) and Democratic…
Opinion polarization is a ubiquitous phenomenon in opinion dynamics. In contrast to the traditional consensus oriented group decision making (GDM) framework, this paper proposes a framework with the co-evolution of both opinions and…
One of the hallmarks of a free and fair society is the ability to conduct a peaceful and seamless transfer of power from one leader to another. Democratically, this is measured in a citizen population's trust in the electoral system of…
Democracies employ elections at various scales to select officials at the corresponding levels of administration. The geographical distribution of political opinion, the policy issues delegated to each level, and the multilevel interactions…
From the 2016 U.S. presidential election to the 2021 Capitol riots to the spread of misinformation related to COVID-19, many have blamed social media for today's deeply divided society. Recent advances in machine learning for signed…
The form of political polarization where citizens develop strongly negative attitudes towards out-party policies and members has become increasingly prominent across many democracies. Economic hardship and social inequality, as well as…
This paper studies the evolution of the distribution of opinions in a population of individuals in which there exist two distinct subgroups of highly-committed, well-connected opinion leaders endowed with a strong convincing power. Each…
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…
Turkey hosts almost 3.5M refugees and has to face a humanitarian emergency of unprecedented levels. We use mobile phone data to map the mobility patterns of both Turkish and Syrian refugees, and use these patterns to build data-driven…
The analysis of social networks enables the understanding of social interactions, polarisation of ideas, and the spread of information and therefore plays an important role in society. We use Twitter data - as it is a popular venue for the…
Using language models, we analyze a sample of 67 million tweets and 30 million Reddit comments referencing a set of 215 political entities from 2010-2023 from partisan users, journalists, and politicians. Our analysis indicates outgroup…
In democracies, major policy decisions typically require some form of majority or consensus, so elites must secure mass support to govern. Historically, elites could shape support only through limited instruments like schooling and mass…
Content on Twitter's home timeline is selected and ordered by personalization algorithms. By consistently ranking certain content higher, these algorithms may amplify some messages while reducing the visibility of others. There's been…
Polarization, declining trust, and wavering support for democratic norms are pressing threats to U.S. democracy. Exposure to verified and quality news may lower individual susceptibility to these threats and make citizens more resilient to…
According to the Eurobarometer report about EU media use of May 2018, the number of European citizens who consult on-line social networks for accessing information is considerably increasing. In this work we analyze approximately $10^6$…
News articles of varying degrees of truthfulness and political alignment, and their influences on the political opinions of the media consumers are modeled as a Bayesian network incorporating a mixture of ideas from dual-reasoning models of…
It is widely believed that society is becoming increasingly polarized around important issues, a dynamic that does not align with common mathematical models of opinion formation in social networks. In particular, measures of polarization…
Digital technologies can augment civic participation by facilitating the expression of detailed political preferences. Yet, digital participation efforts often rely on methods optimized for elections involving a few candidates. Here we…
We introduce a simple, geometric model of opinion polarization. It is a model of political persuasion, as well as marketing and advertising, utilizing social values. It focuses on the interplay between different topics and persuasion…