Related papers: Why are U.S. Parties So Polarized? A "Satisficing"…
Many democratic societies have become more politically polarized, with the U.S. as the main example. The origins of this phenomenon are still not well-understood and subject to debate. To better understand the mechanisms underlying…
The polarization of political opinions among members of the U.S. legislative chambers measured by their voting records is greater today than it was thirty years ago. Previous research efforts to find causes of such increase have suggested…
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…
Has ideological polarization actually increased in the last decades, or have voters simply sorted themselves into parties matching their ideology more closely? We present a novel methodology to quantify multidimensional ideological…
This paper provides a novel summary measure of ideological polarization in the American public based on the joint distribution of survey responses. Intuitively, polarization is maximized when views are concentrated at opposing extremes with…
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…
Democrats and Republicans have seemed to grow apart in the past three decades. Since the United States as we know it today is undeniably bipartisan, this phenomenon would not appear as a surprise to most. However, there are triggers which…
This paper introduces a definition of ideological polarization of an electorate around a particular central point. By being flexible about the location or width of the center, this measure enables the researcher to analyze polarization…
Recent surveys have shown that an increasing portion of the US public believes the two major US parties adequately represent the US public opinion and think additional parties are needed. However, there are high barriers for third parties…
Forecasting elections -- a challenging, high-stakes problem -- is the subject of much uncertainty, subjectivity, and media scrutiny. To shed light on this process, we develop a method for forecasting elections from the perspective of…
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…
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,…
While we typically focus on data visualization as a tool for facilitating cognitive tasks (e.g., learning facts, making decisions), we know relatively little about their second-order impacts on our opinions, attitudes, and values. For…
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…
We measure polarization in the United States Congress using the network science concept of modularity. Modularity provides a conceptually-clear measure of polarization that reveals both the number of relevant groups and the strength of…
The Hotelling-Downs model considers parties changing policy to maximise their vote-share. Where policy position lies on a left-right axis, it describes a tendency for political parties to move towards centrist platforms. This is in contrast…
Political polarization has been a subject that has attracted many studies in recent years. We have developed an opinion dynamics model with affective homophily effect and national social norm effect to describe this phenomenon. The time…
Politics around the world exhibits increasing polarization, demonstrated in part by rigid voting configurations in institutions like legislatures or courts. A crux of polarization is separation along a unidimensional ideological axis, but…
Our paper aims to analyze political polarization in US political system using Language Models, and thereby help candidates make an informed decision. The availability of this information will help voters understand their candidates views on…
The dynamics of political opinion are a critical component of modern society with large-scale implications for the evolution of intra- and international political discourse and policy. Here we utilize recent high-resolution survey data to…