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We provide an NLP framework to uncover four linguistic dimensions of political polarization in social media: topic choice, framing, affect and illocutionary force. We quantify these aspects with existing lexical methods, and propose…

We study individuals' willingness to engage with others who hold opposite views on polarizing policies. A representative sample of 2,507 Americans are given the opportunity to listen to recordings of fellow countrymen and women expressing…

Since the 1960s, Democrats and Republicans in U.S. Congress have taken increasingly polarized positions, while the public's policy positions have remained centrist and moderate. We explain this apparent contradiction by developing a…

Elected officials have privileged roles in public communication. In contrast to national politicians, whose posting content is more likely to be closely scrutinized by a robust ecosystem of nationally focused media outlets, sub-national…

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…

Nowadays there is an increasing interest of physicists in finding regularities related to social phenomena. This interest is clearly motivated by applications that a statistical mechanical description of the human behavior may have in our…

Cooperation in the form of vote trading, also known as logrolling, is central for law-making processes, shaping the development of democratic societies. Empirical evidence of logrolling is scarce and limited to highly specific situations…

Politicians with large media visibility and social media audiences have a significant influence on public discourse. Consequently, their dissemination of misinformation can have profound implications for society. This study investigated the…

We mapped the tweets of 520 US Congress members, focusing on analyzing their engagement with two broad topics: first, the COVID-19 pandemic, and second, the recent wave of anti-racist protest. We find that, in discussing COVID-19, Democrats…

The strongly polarizing political discourse in the U. S. implies that a small minority of the population, determining the outcome of the presidential elections in a few so called battleground-states, also determines the outcome of the…

With the increasing frequency of major natural disasters, understanding their political consequences is of paramount importance for democratic accountability. The existing literature is deeply divided, with some studies finding that voters…

Scientists agree about the urgency of the problem of climate change. Most citizens, however, pay little attention to gradually increasing temperature levels. Growing numbers of natural disasters in the world might then play a fundamental…

There is a widespread belief that the tone of US political language has become more negative recently, in particular when Donald Trump entered politics. At the same time, there is disagreement as to whether Trump changed or merely continued…

In 2020 the tragic murder of George Floyd at the hands of law enforcement ignited and intensified nationwide protests, demanding changes in police funding and allocation. This happened during a budgeting feedback exercise where residents of…

Vaccination against the SARS-CoV-2 disease has significantly reduced its mortality rate and spread. However, despite its availability, a considerable proportion of the public has either refused or delayed getting vaccinated. This reluctance…

Wildfires are increasing in frequency and size across the western U.S., with some of the deadliest fires in recorded history occurring in the last few years. The public, as well as elected officials, use social media to convey opinions and…

Social influence plays an important role in human behavior and decisions. The sources of influence can be generally divided into external, which are independent of social context, or as originating from peers, such as family and friends. An…

The increasing frequency of mass school shootings in the United States has been raised as a critical concern. Active shooters kill innocent students and educators in schools. These tragic events highlight the urgent need for effective…

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, governments had to rapidly implement lockdown policies that restricted human mobility to suppress the spread of the disease and reduce mortality. Because of the movement restrictions resulting from government…

Inspired by the spread of discontent as in the 2016 presidential election, we consider a voter model in which 0's are ordinary voters and 1's are zealots. Thinking of a social network, but desiring the simplicity of an infinite object that…