polarization

People who lean left politically reported an increase in trust in scientists during the COVID-19 pandemic, while those who lean right politically reported much lower levels of trust in scientists. This polarization around scientific issues—from COVID-19 to climate change to evolution—is at its peak since surveys started tracking this question over 50 years ago. …

A few months ago, I knocked on the front door of a house in El Centro while searching for Republicans to interview for a story. An elderly white man opened the main door of the house but left the screen door closed. I struggled to see him through the screen door’s mesh. I told him I was a journalist hoping to learn about his political views, and that I couldn’t see him very well. “That’s the point,” he told me.He seemed angry. He said President Biden was a “dumbass,” adding: “We need to hunt down all the illegals and get…

A cloud of users' opinions with its center of mass marked with a red square and the main components as arrows with lengths proportional to their explained variances. Credit: Samuel Martín-Gutiérrez Germany, India, Mexico, and Spain. As multiparty democracies, these countries present a more complex picture of what brings people together—or divides them. Using social media data, a group of researchers proposes a novel approach…

Political Ideology of European Countries. Credit: EPJ Data Science (2022). DOI: 10.1140/epjds/s13688-022-00367-1 Scientists from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) have designed a new methodology to analyze political polarization through the Facebook posts of European parties. They have also created a website openly displaying these results, where it is possible to make comparisons by country at different times.…

Too Long; Didn't ReadThe Internet has changed drastically and will continue to change. With all its tech-induced marvels, self-serving narratives of macro & micro scale and diverse types of social ebbs & flows, the history of the Internet is worth a review as we are slowly entering a new era of user participation.L O A D I N G. . . comments & more! Too Long; Didn't ReadThe Internet has changed drastically and will continue to change. With all its tech-induced marvels, self-serving narratives of macro &…

Proportion of Women MPs in Party Parliamentary Delegations across 20 Western Democracies, 1996–2017. Note: Data collected by the authors. Credit: American Political Science Review (2022). DOI: 10.1017/S0003055422000491 Nominating and electing more female politicians can help to diffuse polarization and reduce levels of hostility and distrust across party lines, a study shows. …

Content creation and user retweet distributions on Twitter from COP20 to COP26. a, Total number of Twitter posts using the term "COP2x" created each day. Inset: Google Trends (GT) popularity scores for "COP2x," with country-specific scores showing the local enhancement of public engagement. b, The retweet distributions for COP21 and COP26. The total numbers of retweets are shown in the top right. Credit: Nature Climate Change (2022). DOI:…

Summary of causal evidence for digital media effects on political variables. Each box represents one article. Treatments are in white boxes on the left, political outcome variables in colored boxes on the right; M denotes mediators; H represents sources of effect heterogeneity or moderators. Positive (+) and negative () signs at paths indicate reported direction of effects. Location of sample indicated in top right corner of boxes, primary causal…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain There has long been an assumption that a connection exists between affective polarization (i.e., partisan dislike of those in the other party) and anti-democratic attitudes. For that reason, policymakers and practitioners have focused on depolarization strategies to strengthen democracy. A…

A diagram showing standard world view differences between the political left and right. Credit: Photo: David President Biden recently scored a big win in the fight against climate change with his Inflation Reduction Act, but despite the compromises it made to the fossil fuel interest, not a single Republican voted for it—neither in the Senate nor in the House. And despite the extreme weather we've seen this year, 29% of…