Related papers: Polarisation in increasingly connected societies
The abundance of information on social media has reshaped public discussions, shifting attention to the mechanisms that drive online discourse. This study analyzes large-scale Twitter (now X) data from three global debates--Climate Change,…
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,…
Online social networks provide a medium for citizens to form opinions on different societal issues, and a forum for public discussion. They also expose users to viral content, such as breaking news articles. In this paper, we study the…
Social media platforms have transformed the dynamics of collective opinion formation, enabling rapid, large-scale interactions while simultaneously exposing online discourse to polarization and manipulation. Traditional models of opinion…
We introduce and study a simple model for the dynamics of voting intention in a population of agents that have to choose between two candidates. The level of indecision of a given agent is modeled by its propensity to vote for one of the…
Ideologically homogeneous online environments - often described as "echo chambers" or "filter bubbles" - are widely seen as drivers of polarization, radicalization, and misinformation. A central debate asks whether such homophily stems…
The adaptive voter model is widely used to model opinion dynamics in social complex networks. However, existing adaptive voter models are limited to only pairwise interactions and fail to capture the intricate social dynamics that arises in…
Political polarization plays a pivotal and potentially harmful role in a democracy. However, existing studies are often limited to a single country and one form of polarization, hindering a comprehensive understanding of the phenomena. Here…
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…
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…
In the political arena of social platforms, opposing factions of varying sizes show asymmetrical patterns, and elites and masses within these groups have divergent motivations and influence,challenging simplistic views of polarization. Yet,…
A polarized social network is modeled as a system of interacting marked point processes with memory of variable length. Each point process indicates the successive times in which a social actor expresses a "favorable" or "contrary" opinion.…
Optimism about the Internet's potential to bring the world together has been tempered by concerns about its role in inflaming the 'culture wars'. Via mass selection into like-minded groups, online society may be becoming more fragmented and…
Taking a pragmatic approach to the processes involved in the phenomena of collective opinion formation, we investigate two specific modifications to the co-evolving network voter model of opinion formation, studied by Holme and Newman [1].…
This paper introduces a model for opinion dynamics, where at each time step, randomly selected agents see their opinions - modeled as scalars in [0,1] - evolve depending on a local interaction function. In the classical Bounded Confidence…
In populations with community structure, the formation of consensus requires both alignment within and diffusion of beliefs across groups, processes that evolve on distinct time scales. How do modularity, asymmetry, and polarization shape…
Polarization is an increasingly worrying phenomenon within social media. Recent work has made it possible to detect and even quantify polarization. Nevertheless, the few existing metrics, although defined in a continuous space, often lead…
Public discourse emerges from the interplay between individuals' willingness to voice their opinions and the structural features of the social networks in which they are embedded. In this work we investigate how choice homophily and triadic…
As performance gains through scaling data and/or model size experience diminishing returns, it is becoming increasingly popular to turn to ensembling, where the predictions of multiple models are combined to improve accuracy. In this paper,…
The form of political polarization where citizens develop strongly negative attitudes towards out-party policies and members has become increasingly prominent across many democracies. Economic hardship and social inequality, as well as…