Related papers: Does Ideological Polarization Lead to Policy Polar…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
Discussions of political disagreement emphasize two patterns: polarization, where beliefs diverge toward opposite extremes on each issue dimension; and issue alignment, where individuals' views across issues become more internally…
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…
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…
We examine the effects of introducing a political outsider to the nomination process leading to an election. To this end, we develop a sequential game where politicians -- insiders and outsiders -- make a platform offer to a party, and…
This study examines the relationship between ambiguity and the ideological positioning of political parties across the political spectrum. We identify a strong non-monotonic (inverted U-shaped) relationship between party ideology and…
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…
Opinion polarization is on the rise, causing concerns for the openness of public debates. Additionally, extreme opinions on different topics often show significant correlations. The dynamics leading to these polarized ideological opinions…
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…
Analyzing ideology and polarization is of critical importance in advancing our grasp of modern politics. Recent research has made great strides towards understanding the ideological bias (i.e., stance) of news media along the left-right…
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…
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…
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 appears to be on the rise, as measured by voting behavior, general affect towards opposing partisans and their parties, and contents posted and consumed online. Research over the years has focused on the role of the…