Related papers: Comparing Electoral Polarization Levels
When can an interest group exploit polarization between political parties to its advantage? Building upon Battaglini and Patacchini (2018), we study a model where an interest group credibly promises payments to legislators conditional on…
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…
We consider the notions of agreement, diversity, and polarization in ordinal elections (that is, in elections where voters rank the candidates). While (computational) social choice offers good measures of agreement between the voters, such…
The concept of ``ideology" is central to political discourse and dynamics, and is often cast as falling primarily on a one-dimensional scale from ``left-wing/liberal" to ``right-wing/conservative", but the validity of this simple…
Recent years have seen an increase in polarized discourse worldwide, on various platforms. We propose a novel method for quantifying polarization, based on the emotional style of the discourse rather than on differences in ideological…
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…
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…
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…
Social polarization is a growing concern worldwide, as it strains social relations, erodes trust in institutions, and thus threatens democratic societies. Academic efforts to understand this phenomenon have traditionally approached it from…
A survey can be represented by a bipartite network as it has two types of nodes, participants and items in which participants can only interact with items. We introduce an agreement threshold to take a minimal projection of the participants…
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…
Political polarization is traditionally analyzed through the ideological stances of groups and parties, but it also has a behavioral component that manifests in the interactions between individuals. We present an empirical analysis of the…
Theories of democratic stability, populism, and party-system crisis often point to a form of polarization that comparative research rarely measures directly: hostile relations among political elites. Existing comparative measures capture…
Social media platforms significantly influence ideological divisions by enabling users to select information that aligns with their beliefs and avoid opposing viewpoints. Analyzing approximately 47 million Facebook posts, this study…
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…
We study the effect of time-fluctuating social influences on the formation of polarization and consensus in a three-party community consisting of two types of voters ("leftists" and "rightists") holding extreme opinions, and moderate agents…
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…
The aim of this paper is to analyze the processes of polarization and agglomeration, to explain the mechanisms and causes of these phenomena in order to identify similarities and differences. As the main implication of this study should be…
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…
There are some shreds of evidence that social opinion polarization leads to the breakup of the relationship, some in the scale of small communities, but others can divide large organizations or even a nation. The legacy methodology to…