Why Are U.S. Parties So Polarized? A “Satisficing” Dynamical Model

Yang, Vicky Chuqiao; Abrams, Daniel M.; Kernell, Georgia; Motter, Adilson E.

doi:10.1137/19m1254246

Cited by 17 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…Moreover, existing structures of representative democracy have proven inadequate in expressing the collective will of the people (Lee, Zhang & Yang, 2017), and have been shown to contribute to political polarization (Yang, Abrams, Kernell & Motter, 2020). Political parties themselves can be seen as a sort of clustering or reduced dimensionality across all possible issues of interest, frequently forcing voters to sacrifice their positions on issues of importance to them, and often not having any candidate at all representing their positions on other issues.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Polis: Escalar de la deliberación mediante el mapeo de espacios de opinión de alta dimensión

Small

2021

RPA

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Deliberative and participatory approaches to democracy seek to directly include citizens in decision-making and agenda-setting processes. These methods date back to the very foundations of democracy in Athens, where regular citizens shared the burden of governance and deliberated every major issue. However, thinkers at the time rightly believed that these methods could not function beyond the scale of the city-state, or polis. Representative democracy as an innovation improved on the scalability of collective decision making, but in doing so, sacrificed the extent to which regular citizens could participate in deliberation. Modern technology, including advances in computational power, machine learning algorithms, and data visualization techniques, presents a unique opportunity to scale out deliberative processes. Here we describe Polis, an open source web application capable of collecting and synthesizing feedback from people in a scalable and distributed fashion. Polis has shown itself capable of building shared understanding, disincentivizing counterproductive behavior (trolling), and cultivating points of consensus. It has done this in the context of journalistic and academic research, and directly as part of decision-making bodies at local and national levels, directly affecting legislation. These results demonstrate that deliberative processes can be scaled up beyond the constraints of in-person gatherings and small groups.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Polis: Escalar de la deliberación mediante el mapeo de espacios de opinión de alta dimensión

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2021

RPA

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“…One potential danger here is that clustering in this way would get you back into a polarized electorate, with a very limited set of options presented to each voter and with little potential for compromise. In fact, recent work shows that this polarized state, once achieved, may be very difficult to break from [12,16].Once again, we all wind up bundling the issues into a single metaissue with two sides, Republican or Democrat, rather than looking deeper. And in reality, political parties are always shifting their platforms in response to events and voter opinions, although different parties tend to do this in different ways and for different reasons [10].…”

Section: Other Options Just Muddy the Processmentioning

confidence: 97%

Aligning Political Options and Aggregated Personal Opinions on the Issues

Green¹

2021

jhummath

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Much work has been done in studying how to aggregate voter opinions to decide a fair election. These models presuppose that each voter has a solid understanding of their choices and can express that opinion in the election process. We discuss why this is not always the case. Further, we explore some of the issues that arise when considering the multidimensional nature of both voter preference, with respect to the slate of issues in an election, and the platforms of the various candidates, with respect to the same slate of issues. In light of the complications we encounter and with full apologies to Jonathan Swift, a modest proposal is made for conducting future elections in a way that offers all of the voters a true chance to find a voice.

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“…* Many ABMs assume that actors' positions are initially distributed uniformly or randomly; we, instead, assume the nor-* We assume that ideological positions are bounded to prevent repulsion from causing unbounded moves and because ideological positions are typically measured in surveys by questions with a limited integer range, for example, on a five-or seven-point scale. mal (Gaussian) distribution which is more realistic for modeling human political views (6). † Initial positions are normally distributed with a mean of 0.5 and SD of σ = 0.2, unless stated otherwise.…”

Section: The Attraction-repulsion Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Ideological polarization is already strong among elites but is less pronounced among the general public; see ref. 6 and pp. 50-68 of ref.…”

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confidence: 99%

Preventing extreme polarization of political attitudes

Axelrod

Daymude

Forrest

2021

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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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 elites, but less so among the general public [N. McCarty, Polarization: What Everyone Needs to Know, 2019, pp. 50–68]. Strong mutual distrust and hostility between Democrats and Republicans in the United States, combined with the elites’ already strong ideological polarization, could lead to increasing ideological polarization among the public. The paper addresses two questions: 1) Is there a level of ideological polarization above which polarization feeds upon itself to become a runaway process? 2) If so, what policy interventions could prevent such dangerous positive feedback loops? To explore these questions, we present an agent-based model of ideological polarization that differentiates between the tendency for two actors to interact (“exposure”) and how they respond when interactions occur, positing that interaction between similar actors reduces their difference, while interaction between dissimilar actors increases their difference. Our analysis explores the effects on polarization of different levels of tolerance to other views, responsiveness to other views, exposure to dissimilar actors, multiple ideological dimensions, economic self-interest, and external shocks. The results suggest strategies for preventing, or at least slowing, the development of extreme polarization.

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Why Are U.S. Parties So Polarized? A “Satisficing” Dynamical Model

Cited by 17 publications

References 24 publications

Polis: Escalar de la deliberación mediante el mapeo de espacios de opinión de alta dimensión

Polis: Escalar de la deliberación mediante el mapeo de espacios de opinión de alta dimensión

Aligning Political Options and Aggregated Personal Opinions on the Issues

Preventing extreme polarization of political attitudes

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