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A new theory about political polarization

phys.org

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Re: A new theory about political polarization

#41

Post by moate »

buboard wrote: post #25

I find such studies rather shallow, just explaining away a phenomenon without looking deeper for causes. I dont think the level of political animosity that the USA seems to have now has been seen before, maybe ever. In no other country have people massively defied death in the way americans do today. When people stop valuing their lives , it seems rather like a change in psychology. Maybe it's not even a political ph…

" I dont think the level of political animosity that the USA seems to have now has been seen before, maybe ever."

Wait til you find out about what happened from 1775–1783 or 1861-1865. It's gonna blow your mind dude!

Re: A new theory about political polarization

#42

Post by idrios »

I like this article a lot and would like to see it expanded upon further. Based on their visuals and explanation (without seeing equations) it looks like they've modelled an individual's political alignment based on a number of orthogonal issues and based on how they see their peers. So if there were 3 issues (examples used were marijuana legalization, gay marriage and income tax) then there are 4 forces acting on each person - marijuana legalization, gay marriage, income tax, and pressure from peers.

But their model could be expanded to account for people who are single issue extremists (e.g. a dot that isn't pulled to other dots but does pull other dots towards it), randomness or irrationallity (dots suddenly jumping, possibly to be pulled back or possibly not), and in general more variance in the weight of the force for each individual.

Side note: Is there a field of political science that builds and works off of statistical models similar to how they did in this article? I know that basically the entire field of economics does this, but what about political science?

Re: A new theory about political polarization

#43

Post by ChainOfFools »

nordsieck wrote: post #37
tusharchoudhary wrote: post #21

Political science seems to be going through a phase of questioning the rationality of voters. The two major theories of public choice -- Median Voter theory[1] (political parties take positions that appeal to the median voter) and Investment theory of Party Competition[2] (parties take positions most beneficial to their donors), both assume emotions (irrationality) of voters to be small. In the current political clim…

> The two major theories of public choice -- Median Voter theory[1] (political parties take positions that appeal to the median voter) and Investment theory of Party Competition[2] (parties take positions most beneficial to their donors), both assume emotions (irrationality) of voters to be small. In the current political climate -- while it seems that the explanatory power of emotions seems to have gone up, it isn't…

Perhapa shorter messages reach more targets' emotional activation potential with better propagation fidelity and much less energetic commitment per impression?

Mass media is increasingly a battle of bottlenecked channel management and rationally persuasive content simply doesn't survive this infrastructure without being ground down into smooth, bite sized harangues.

And if you are going to get massed support for an issue, emotional persuasion content suffers much less from propagation distortion because it's distorted to begin with.

Re: A new theory about political polarization

#44

Post by antiutopian »

tehjoker wrote: post #17

This is the kind of stuff when you get when you don't know anything about historical materialism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism Historical materialism is the idea that politics comes from changes in the material conditions of a population. When people need something and aren't getting it, then they meet others in the same situation and compare notes, then you get a political formation. The Unit…

Agreed. It must be a strange time to be alive for people who are not Marxists! Today's political polarization in the US is rooted in the 08 financial crisis, followed by a weak recovery, combined with skyrocketing inequality, and now a pandemic absolutely mishandled by the US administration, plus now a new recession! How could we expect people's political views to stay the same after such experiences?

Re: A new theory about political polarization

#45

Post by ordu »

jjk166 wrote: post #39
happytoexplain wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a stretch. Conversationally, the implication of your sentence has real meaning - it's not redundant, despite sounding verbally repetitive.

Masses attract because they are attracted to eachother is not a theory of gravity, it's a restatement of the givens. People are polarized because they polarize is likewise a restatement of the givens. That people don't like being non-polarized is inferred from the observation that they are polarized, the same way that the attractive property of masses is inferred from the observation of masses that have been attracte…

> Masses attract because they are attracted to eachother is not a theory of gravity, it's a restatement of the givens.

Newton's theory of gravity had been dominating for a several centuries. It states literally this, masses attract because they are attracted. Despite of this it is a very valuable theory even now.

> Theories explain observations, and predict what ought to be observed beyond the data used in their formulation.

A very good theories manage to combine good explanations with a predictive power. But there are countless examples of theories which could give either explanation or predictive power. Moreover there are theories which manage neither explanations nor predictions, but something else. For example they can be used as an data structure for storing and retrieving facts: Carl Linnaeus devised the Linnean taxonomy, which directed biological research for a long time, even there were nor explanations nor predictions.

I'm not sure though, maybe I'm stretching the term "theory" a little? But if we asked functions of Linnean taxonomy in times before Darwin, then we'd find that it's functions were functions of a theory: to collect and to classify facts and to drive research.

Re: A new theory about political polarization

#46

Post by mmcconnell1618 »

raz32dust wrote: post #26

Disappointed to not see any mention of ranked choice voting. I think the winner takes all system leads to a two-party duopoly and makes it difficult for intermediate positions to win. P.S: Yes, I know Australia has ranked choice and they also have problems. Of course it's not a panacea, there are other problems like the role of money in politics. But it will be better than what we have today, and should reduce polari…

Harvard Business Review podcast had an interesting take on this which suggested that the party-aligned primary system was the main cause. They applied Porter's 5 Forces to politics and suggested ranked choice voting would be one of the main ways to break to duopoly.

https://hbr.org/podcast/2020/06/applying-porters-five-forces...

Re: A new theory about political polarization

#47

Post by eximius »

jjk166 wrote: post #6

People are polarized because they don't like being not polarized isn't really a theory, it's a tautology.

People are fit because they don't like being not fit. Except it isn't true.

I do not see a meaningful difference between taking actions to become fit and choosing stances that are polarized, therefore that would imply this is not a tautology.

Re: A new theory about political polarization

#49

Post by raz32dust »

mmcconnell1618 wrote: post #46
raz32dust wrote: post #26

Disappointed to not see any mention of ranked choice voting. I think the winner takes all system leads to a two-party duopoly and makes it difficult for intermediate positions to win. P.S: Yes, I know Australia has ranked choice and they also have problems. Of course it's not a panacea, there are other problems like the role of money in politics. But it will be better than what we have today, and should reduce polari…

Harvard Business Review podcast had an interesting take on this which suggested that the party-aligned primary system was the main cause. They applied Porter's 5 Forces to politics and suggested ranked choice voting would be one of the main ways to break to duopoly. https://hbr.org/podcast/2020/06/applying-porters-five-forces...

It makes sense right? It's so ridiculous to see Biden and Bernie battle it out in "Stage 1", and then only one of them gets to go against Trump. Instead of Biden, Bernie and Trump and everyone else just run together in a race as it should really be. We might have even had a better person on the Republican side in this case.

Re: A new theory about political polarization

#50

Post by tehjoker »

ChainOfFools wrote: post #34
tehjoker wrote: post #17

This is the kind of stuff when you get when you don't know anything about historical materialism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism Historical materialism is the idea that politics comes from changes in the material conditions of a population. When people need something and aren't getting it, then they meet others in the same situation and compare notes, then you get a political formation. The Unit…

Isn't this just Marxism with all the Marxist theory about class struggle rephrased into plain conflict theory language and de-jargonified?

Yes. It's much more understandable that way (and I don't have a useless Marxist academic position to justify). Frankly, I find it rather difficult to disagree with the premise of historical materialism.

You can disagree with Marx's conclusions about which factors were important, but the basic assumption seems solid. The major exception that comes to mind where ideas might dominate material need is a situation present in the US today where the media so dominantly control narrative, they have been able to mostly squeeze other ideas out of the discourse. This is sort of like fighting entropy, possible, but requires extra energies to do.

I hadn't heard of conflict theory before, so thanks for the tip.

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