Related papers: Does Ideological Polarization Lead to Policy Polar…
We live in an age of information abundance but know little about how this influences our opinions or attitudes. A common expectation is that people consulting numerous pieces of information, well balancing the different sides of an issue,…
With the recent advances of networking technology, connections among people are unprecedentedly enhanced. People with different ideologies and backgrounds interact with each other, and there may exist severe opinion polarization and…
Group polarization, the phenomenon where individuals become more extreme after interacting, has been gaining attention, especially with the rise of social media shaping people's opinions. Recent interest has emerged in formal reasoning…
Prior research shows that public opinion on climate politics sorts along partisan lines. However, they leave open the question of whether climate politics and other politically salient issues exhibit tendencies for issue alignment, which…
The flow of information reaching us via the online media platforms is optimized not by the information content or relevance but by popularity and proximity to the target. This is typically performed in order to maximise platform usage. As a…
We propose to measure political bias in LLMs by analyzing both the content and style of their generated content regarding political issues. Existing benchmarks and measures focus on gender and racial biases. However, political bias exists…
Some of the most pivotal moments in intellectual history occur when a new ideology sweeps through a society, supplanting an established system of beliefs in a rapid revolution of thought. Yet in many cases the new ideology is as extreme as…
Polarization is a troubling phenomenon that can lead to societal divisions and hurt the democratic process. It is therefore important to develop methods to reduce it. We propose an algorithmic solution to the problem of reducing…
Political polarization generates strong effects on society, driving controversial debates and influencing the institutions. Territorial disputes are one of the most important polarized scenarios and have been consistently related to the use…
The probability of a given candidate winning a future election is worked out in closed form as a function of (i) the current support rates for each candidate, (ii) the relative positioning of the candidates within the political spectrum,…
The colloquial phrase "partisan bias" encompasses multiple distinct conceptions of bias, including partisan advantage, packing & cracking, and partisan symmetry. All are useful and have their place, and there are several proposed measures…
While recent research has systematically documented political orientation in large language models (LLMs), existing evaluations rely primarily on direct probing or demographic persona engineering to surface ideological biases. In social…
Does polarization online reflect the state of polarization in society? We study ideological positions and attitudes on several issues in France, a country with documented issue nonalignment. We compare distributions on X/Twitter with a…
What role do non-elected bureaucrats play when elections provide imperfect accountability and create incentives for pandering? We develop a model where politicians and bureaucrats interact to implement policy. Both can either be good,…
This paper investigates how content moderation affects content creation in an ideologically diverse online environments. We develop a model in which users act as both creators and consumers, differing in their ideological affiliation and…
We study how motivated reasoning affects the provision of climate policy in an electoral competition framework. Voters experience anticipatory disutility when future outcomes appear grim and may therefore distort beliefs in response to…
Social media has played an important role in shaping political discourse over the last decade. At the same time, it is often perceived to have increased political polarization, thanks to the scale of discussions and their public nature. In…
Deliberative processes are often discussed as increasing or decreasing polarization. This approach misses a different, and arguably more diagnostic, dimension of opinion change: whether deliberation reshuffles who agrees with whom, or…
Affective polarization, characterized by increased negativity and hostility towards opposing groups, has become a prominent feature of political discourse worldwide. Our study examines the presence of this type of polarization in a…
We develop a model of social media in which users produce different types of content and choose whom to follow. Even when abstracting from algorithmic bias, linking costs shape networks and polarization. In the welfare-maximizing…