Related papers: Competing Activists--Political Polarization
Polarization and unexpected correlations between opinions on diverse topics (including in politics, culture and consumer choices) are an object of sustained attention. However, numerous theoretical models do not seem to convincingly explain…
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…
Opinion Dynamics is an interdisciplinary area of research. Psychology and Sociology have proposed models of how individuals form opinions and how social interactions influence this process. Socio-Physicists have interpreted patterns in…
Political polarization has become a growing concern in democratic societies, as it drives tribal alignments and erodes civic deliberation among citizens. Given its prevalence across different countries, previous research has sought to…
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…
Two of the main factors shaping an individual's opinion are social coordination and personal preferences, or personal biases. To understand the role of those and that of the topology of the network of interactions, we study an extension of…
Competition between varying ideas, people and institutions fuels the dynamics of socio-economic systems. Numerous analyses of the empirical data extracted from different financial markets have established a consistent set of stylized facts…
As scientists we like to think that modern societies and their members base their views, opinions and behaviour on scientific facts. This is not necessarily the case, even though we are all (over-) exposed to information flow through…
Social networks have provided a platform for the effective exchange of ideas or opinions but also served as a hotbed of polarization. While much research attempts to explore different causes of opinion polarization, the effect of perception…
Human interactions create social networks forming the backbone of societies. Individuals adjust their opinions by exchanging information through social interactions. Two recurrent questions are whether social structures promote opinion…
This paper introduces a definition of ideological polarization of an electorate around a particular central point. The definition is flexible about the location or boundaries of the center. Using US survey data, the paper shows how this…
Messages conveyed by media act as a major drive in shaping attitudes and inducing opinion shift. On the other hand, individuals are strongly affected by peer pressure while forming their own judgment. We solve a general model of opinion…
Polarization between groups is a major topic of contemporary societal debate as well as of research into intergroup relations. Formal modelers of opinion dynamics try to explain how intergroup polarization can arise from simple first…
Engaging with dissenting views, fostering productive disagreements or strategic anticonformity can benefit organizations as it challenges the status quo. The question arises, however, whether such strategic anticonformity ultimately leads…
I study an election between two ideologically polarized parties that are both office- and policy-motivated. The parties compete by proposing policies on a single issue. The analysis uncovers a non-monotonic relationship between ideological…
Research on the causes of political polarization points towards multiple drivers of the problem, from social and psychological to economic and technological. However, political institutions stand out, because -- while capable of…
We investigate the role of opinion leaders or influentials in the collective behavior of a social system. Opinion leaders are characterized by their unidirectional influence on other agents. We employ a model based on Axelrod's dynamics for…
We propose an opinion model based on agents located at the vertices of a regular lattice. Each agent has an independent opinion (among an arbitrary, but fixed, number of choices) and its own degree of conviction. The latter changes every…
The intensification of affective polarization worldwide has raised new questions about how social media platforms might be further fracturing an already-divided public sphere. As opposed to ideological polarization, affective polarization…
Social and political polarization is a significant source of conflict and poor governance in many societies. Thus, understanding its causes has become a priority of scholars across many disciplines. Here we demonstrate that shifts in…