Related papers: Relationship between ideology and language in the …
The widespread emergence of opinion polarization is often attributed to the rise of social media and the internet, which can promote selective exposure and the formation of echo chambers. However, experimental evidence shows that exposure…
Polarization of societies is getting more and more attention from researchers working at the intersection of many fields, because it seems to be a defining feature of many public domains. In this paper, we are going to investigate how 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…
Echo chambers and opinion polarization recently quantified in several sociopolitical contexts and across different social media, raise concerns on their potential impact on the spread of misinformation and on openness of debates. Despite…
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…
Political polarization in online social platforms is a rapidly growing phenomenon worldwide. Despite their relevance to modern-day politics, the structure and dynamics of polarized states in digital spaces are still poorly understood. We…
How do European publics debate a geopolitical crisis on social media, and do they inhabit a shared informational reality? We analyze over 38 million geolocated tweets from 20 European countries during the first eight months of the Russian…
With the growth of online news over the past decade, empirical studies on political discourse and news consumption have focused on the phenomenon of filter bubbles and echo chambers. Yet recently, scholars have revealed limited evidence…
Politically divided societies are also often divided emotionally: people like and trust those with similar political views (in-group favoritism) while disliking and distrusting those with different views (out-group animosity). This…
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…
In today's digital age, social media platforms play a crucial role in shaping public opinion. This study explores how discussions led by influencers on Twitter, now known as 'X', affect public sentiment and contribute to online…
The rise in popularity of Twitter has led to a debate on its impact on public opinions. The optimists foresee an increase in online participation and democratization due to social media's personal and interactive nature. Cyber-pessimists,…
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…
We investigate the polarization of the German Twittersphere by extracting the main issues discussed and the signaled opinions of users towards those issues based on (re)tweets concerning trending topics. The dataset covers daily trending…
In this paper, we study the implications of the commonplace assumption that most social media studies make with respect to the nature of message shares (such as retweets) as a predominantly positive interaction. By analyzing two large…
We explore how the polarization around controversial topics evolves on Twitter - over a long period of time (2011 to 2016), and also as a response to major external events that lead to increased related activity. We find that increased…
Multiple countries have recently experienced extreme political polarization, which in some cases led to escalation of hate crime, violence and political instability. Beside the much discussed presidential elections in the United States and…
Our usage of language is not solely reliant on cognition but is arguably determined by myriad external factors leading to a global variability of linguistic patterns. This issue, which lies at the core of sociolinguistics and is backed by…
Climate change and political polarisation are two of the 21st century's critical socio-political issues. Here, we investigate their intersection by studying the discussion around the UN Conference of The Parties on Climate Change (COP)…
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…