Attraction by ingroup coherence drives the emergence of ideological sorting

The increasing political polarization is driving hatred and segregation, and these pose a threat to democracy. While disagreement on policy issues is increasing and receiving great attention, people are also becoming more aligned across diverse and seemingly unrelated topics, leading to issue polari...

Descripción completa

Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Navajas, Joaquín, Zimmerman, Federico, Pedraza, Lucía, Balenzuela, Pablo
Formato: info:eu-repo/semantics/preprint submittedVersion
Lenguaje:Inglés
Publicado: 2023
Materias:
Social and Information Networks
Physics and Society
Democracia
Polarización política
Acceso en línea:https://repositorio.utdt.edu/handle/20.500.13098/11845
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2304.12559
Aporte de:
Repositorio Digital Universidad Torcuato Di Tella de Universidad Torcuato Di Tella
id I57-R163-20.500.13098-11845
record_format dspace
spelling I57-R163-20.500.13098-118452023-06-01T07:00:34Z Attraction by ingroup coherence drives the emergence of ideological sorting Navajas, Joaquín Zimmerman, Federico Pedraza, Lucía Balenzuela, Pablo Social and Information Networks Physics and Society Democracia Polarización política The increasing political polarization is driving hatred and segregation, and these pose a threat to democracy. While disagreement on policy issues is increasing and receiving great attention, people are also becoming more aligned across diverse and seemingly unrelated topics, leading to issue polarization and ideological sorting. Observational studies have described the rising ideological alignment and experimental work has addressed the relevant mechanisms involved in political interactions. However, how these two relevant phenomena relate to each other is still unclear. To address this question, we propose a multidimensional agent-based model that incorporates two main mechanisms: homophily, in which people who share similar opinions are more likely to interact, and ingroup-coherence favoritism, in which partisans are more attracted to coherent ingroups rather than incoherent or outgroup members. We developed and solved the model's master equations that perfectly describe the simulated model's dynamics. We found that the ideological alignment reported in political opinions in several experiments can only be explained by the presence of ingroup-coherence favoritism in pairwise interactions. By comparing the model's outcomes with more than 20,000 opinions from people living in different countries, the model can infer the weight of ingroup-coherence needed to match each other. We found a strong correspondence between the presence of this mechanism and the political content of the answers. This work helps us understand the role of ingroup-coherence favoritism in political opinion formation and sheds light on the importance of combining efforts from experimental approaches, theoretical modeling, and large-scale empirical studies. 2023-05-31T16:46:15Z 2023-05-31T16:46:15Z 2023 info:eu-repo/semantics/preprint info:eu-repo/semantics/submittedVersion https://repositorio.utdt.edu/handle/20.500.13098/11845 https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2304.12559 eng info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 32 p. application/pdf application/pdf
institution Universidad Torcuato Di Tella
institution_str I-57
repository_str R-163
collection Repositorio Digital Universidad Torcuato Di Tella
language Inglés
orig_language_str_mv eng
topic Social and Information Networks
Physics and Society
Democracia
Polarización política
spellingShingle Social and Information Networks
Physics and Society
Democracia
Polarización política
Navajas, Joaquín
Zimmerman, Federico
Pedraza, Lucía
Balenzuela, Pablo
Attraction by ingroup coherence drives the emergence of ideological sorting
topic_facet Social and Information Networks
Physics and Society
Democracia
Polarización política
description The increasing political polarization is driving hatred and segregation, and these pose a threat to democracy. While disagreement on policy issues is increasing and receiving great attention, people are also becoming more aligned across diverse and seemingly unrelated topics, leading to issue polarization and ideological sorting. Observational studies have described the rising ideological alignment and experimental work has addressed the relevant mechanisms involved in political interactions. However, how these two relevant phenomena relate to each other is still unclear. To address this question, we propose a multidimensional agent-based model that incorporates two main mechanisms: homophily, in which people who share similar opinions are more likely to interact, and ingroup-coherence favoritism, in which partisans are more attracted to coherent ingroups rather than incoherent or outgroup members. We developed and solved the model's master equations that perfectly describe the simulated model's dynamics. We found that the ideological alignment reported in political opinions in several experiments can only be explained by the presence of ingroup-coherence favoritism in pairwise interactions. By comparing the model's outcomes with more than 20,000 opinions from people living in different countries, the model can infer the weight of ingroup-coherence needed to match each other. We found a strong correspondence between the presence of this mechanism and the political content of the answers. This work helps us understand the role of ingroup-coherence favoritism in political opinion formation and sheds light on the importance of combining efforts from experimental approaches, theoretical modeling, and large-scale empirical studies.
format info:eu-repo/semantics/preprint
submittedVersion
author Navajas, Joaquín
Zimmerman, Federico
Pedraza, Lucía
Balenzuela, Pablo
author_facet Navajas, Joaquín
Zimmerman, Federico
Pedraza, Lucía
Balenzuela, Pablo
author_sort Navajas, Joaquín
title Attraction by ingroup coherence drives the emergence of ideological sorting
title_short Attraction by ingroup coherence drives the emergence of ideological sorting
title_full Attraction by ingroup coherence drives the emergence of ideological sorting
title_fullStr Attraction by ingroup coherence drives the emergence of ideological sorting
title_full_unstemmed Attraction by ingroup coherence drives the emergence of ideological sorting
title_sort attraction by ingroup coherence drives the emergence of ideological sorting
publishDate 2023
url https://repositorio.utdt.edu/handle/20.500.13098/11845
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2304.12559
work_keys_str_mv AT navajasjoaquin attractionbyingroupcoherencedrivestheemergenceofideologicalsorting
AT zimmermanfederico attractionbyingroupcoherencedrivestheemergenceofideologicalsorting
AT pedrazalucia attractionbyingroupcoherencedrivestheemergenceofideologicalsorting
AT balenzuelapablo attractionbyingroupcoherencedrivestheemergenceofideologicalsorting
_version_ 1768086690236203008

Ejemplares similares