Polarization under rising inequality and economic decline

Abstract

Social and political polarization is an important source of conflict in many societies. Understanding its causes has become a priority of scholars across disciplines. We demonstrate that shifts in socialization strategies analogous to political polarization can arise as a locally beneficial response to both rising wealth inequality and economic decline. In many contexts, interaction with diverse out-groups confers benefits from innovation and exploration greater than those that arise from interacting exclusively with a homogeneous in-group. However, when the economic environment favors risk aversion, a strategy of seeking lower-risk in-group interactions can be important to maintaining individual solvency. Our model shows that under conditions of economic decline or increasing inequality, some members of the population benefit from adopting a risk-averse, in-group favoring strategy. Moreover, we show that such in-group polarization can spread rapidly to the whole population and persist even when the conditions that produced it have reversed.

Inequality, identity, and partisanship: How redistribution can stem the tide of mass polarization

“…To study the cultural evolution of mass political polarization, we generalize a model previously developed to study intergroup polarization and economic interactions (20).…”

“…The growth of intergroup antagonism has been shown to have multiple contributing factors, including economic adversity, racial animus, and a range of other socioeconomic factors (12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18)(19). Recent work focusing on the cultural evolution of polarization along identity group lines (20) has shown that a rise in economic adversity or inequality can cause polarized behavioral strategies to take hold and become entrenched in a population, even when the adverse conditions that stimulated it are reversed (21).…”

Income Inequality and Global Political Polarization: The Economic Origin of Political Polarization in the World

“…The perceptions of poverty, deprivation and injustice are considered to arouse subjective feelings of frustration and anxiety that ultimately can result in more extreme political attitudes and ideologies [4]. Second, under conditions of growing poverty and greater inequality, different sub-groups of the population tend to adopt risk-averse and in-group favoring strategies while reducing out-group interactions [46]. This will facilitate the formation of the concept of "distinction", which may first push the subpopulation facing economic hardship to become polarized and then, more detrimentally result in the whole population being susceptible to a state of polarization [23].…”

“…Growing inequality could undermine social mobility, induce violent conflicts, and generate political tensions. At the same time, there is widespread concern that the "vicious cycle of poverty" and rising income inequality constitute an important cause of political polarization that threatens to divide and even destabilize a nation [3,46,47]. Political polarization refers to the vast and growing gap of political attitudes and identities among the public that undermine the pursuit of a common good.…”

“…In recent decades, political polarization has intensified globally and has been a disruptive force in societies across the world, from advanced countries including the US and those in Europe to the developing world such as Brazil, India, Turkey and Poland. To examine the driving forces behind political polarization, the current well-developed scholarship has mainly examined factors such as the changes in socio-demographic cleavages, the suffering of economic hardship, the rise of identity politics, the design of political institutions, and the essential role of social media in shaping people's ideologies [21,25,46]. Meanwhile, these studies typically focus on a single country (for example, the US) or a region (for example, Europe) and have so far neglected to identify a global causal pattern of political polarization [19,38].…”