Related papers: Identifying opinion-based groups from survey data:…
Networks, representing attitudinal survey data, expose the structure of opinion-based groups. We make use of these network projections to identify the groups reliably through community detection algorithms and to examine…
Opinion surveys can contain closed questions to which respondents can give multiple answers. We propose to model these data as networks in which vertices are eligible items and arcs are respondents. This representation opens up the…
We explore a new mechanism to explain polarization phenomena in opinion dynamics in which agents evaluate alternative views on the basis of the social feedback obtained on expressing them. High support of the favored opinion in the social…
Many empirical networks are intrinsically pluralistic, with interactions occurring within groups of arbitrary agents. Then the agent in the network can be influenced by types of neighbors, common examples include similarity, opposition, and…
A multi-level model of opinion formation is presented which takes into account that attitudes on different issues are usually not independent. In the model, agents exchange beliefs regarding a series of facts. A cognitive structure of…
The related concepts of partisan belief systems, issue alignment, and partisan sorting are central to our understanding of politics. These phenomena have been studied using measures of alignment between pairs of topics, or how much…
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…
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,…
Public opinion is a crucial factor in shaping political decision-making. Nowadays, social media has become an essential platform for individuals to engage in political discussions and express their political views, presenting researchers…
Systems with two types of agents with a preference for heterophilous interaction produces networks that are more or less close to bipartite. We propose two measures quantifying the notion of bipartivity. The two measures--one well-known and…
Ideological leanings of an individual can often be gauged by the sentiment one expresses about different issues. We propose a simple framework that represents a political ideology as a distribution of sentiment polarities towards a set of…
Bipartite networks are a useful tool for representing and investigating interaction networks. We consider methods for identifying communities in bipartite networks. Intuitive notions of network community groups are made explicit using…
Shared opinions are an important feature in the formation of social groups. In this paper, we use the Axelrod model of cultural dissemination to represent opinion-based groups. In the Axelrod model, each agent has a set of features which…
Relations between discrete quantities such as people, genes, or streets can be described by networks, which consist of nodes that are connected by edges. Network analysis aims to identify important nodes in a network and to uncover…
Selective exposure, individuals' inclination to seek out information that supports their beliefs while avoiding information that contradicts them, plays an important role in the emergence of polarization and echo chambers. In the political…
In recommender systems, users rate items, and are subsequently served other product recommendations based on these ratings. Even though users usually rate a tiny percentage of the available items, the system tries to estimate unobserved…
Bipartite networks provide an effective resource for representing, characterizing, and modeling several abstract and real-world systems and structures involving binary relations, which include food webs, social interactions, and…
Understanding political phenomena requires measuring the political preferences of society. We introduce a model based on mixtures of spatial voting models that infers the underlying distribution of political preferences of voters with only…
This paper contributes to an emerging literature that models votes and text in tandem to better understand polarization of expressed preferences. It introduces a new approach to estimate preference polarization in multidimensional settings,…
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…