Related papers: Competing Activists--Political Polarization
The emergence of opinion polarization within human communities -- the phenomenon that individuals within a society tend to develop conflicting attitudes related to the greatest diversity of topics -- has been a focus of interest for…
Political polarization can be beneficial to competing political parties. I study how electoral competition itself generates incentives to polarize voters, even when parties are ex ante identical and motivated purely by political power,…
Social media are decentralized, interactive, and transformative, empowering users to produce and spread information to influence others. This has changed the dynamics of political communication that were previously dominated by traditional…
In modern democracies, the outcome of elections and referendums is often remarkably tight. The repetition of these divisive events are the hallmark of a split society; to the physicist, however, it is an astonishing feat for such large…
Defying the median voter theorem, party polarization has spread globally, especially in the United States. As concerns grow over its risks to democracy, political science has probed its causes, revealing two paradoxes: while polarization…
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.…
Independent voters play an increasingly decisive role in contemporary elections, yet their collective behavior remains poorly understood. This paper investigates how a minority of voters with greater flexibility in their political…
The widespread emergence of opinion polarization is often attributed to the rise of social media and the internet, which can promote selective exposure and the formation of echo chambers. However, experimental evidence shows that exposure…
The flow of information reaching us via the online media platforms is optimized not by the information content or relevance but by popularity and proximity to the target. This is typically performed in order to maximise platform usage. As a…
Echo chambers and opinion polarization recently quantified in several sociopolitical contexts and across different social media, raise concerns on their potential impact on the spread of misinformation and on openness of debates. Despite…
Political polarization is perceived as a threat to democracies. Using the Galam model of opinion dynamics deployed in a five-dimensional parameter space, I show that polarization is the byproduct of an essential hallmark of a vibrant…
The flourishing of fake news is favored by recommendation algorithms of online social networks which, based on previous users activity, provide content adapted to their preferences and so create filter bubbles. We introduce an analytically…
We study the opinion dynamics in a generalized voter model in which voters are additionally influenced by two antagonistic news sources, whose effect is to promote political polarization. We show that, as the influence of the news sources…
We introduce a socially motivated extension of the voter model in which individual voters are also influenced by two opposing, fixed-opinion news sources. These sources forestall consensus and instead drive the population to a politically…
The median voter theorem has long been the default model of voter behavior and candidate choice. While contemporary work on the distribution of political opinion has emphasized polarization and an increasing gap between the "left" and the…
Understanding the social conditions that tend to increase or decrease polarization is important for many reasons. We study a network-structured agent-based model of opinion dynamics, extending a model previously introduced by Flache and…
Extreme polarization can undermine democracy by making compromise impossible and transforming politics into a zero-sum game. Ideological polarization - the extent to which political views are widely dispersed - is already strong among…
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…
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,…
In the political arena of social platforms, opposing factions of varying sizes show asymmetrical patterns, and elites and masses within these groups have divergent motivations and influence,challenging simplistic views of polarization. Yet,…