Abstract

Many democratic societies have become more politically polarized, with the U.S. being the main example. The origins of this phenomenon are still not well-understood and subject to debate. To provide insight into some of the mechanisms underlying political polarization, we develop a mathematical framework and employ Bayesian Markov chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) and information-theoretic concepts to analyze empirical data on political polarization that has been collected by Pew Research Center from 1994 to 2017. Our framework can capture the evolution of polarization in the Democratic- and Republican-leaning segments of the U.S. public and allows us to identify its drivers. Our empirical and quantitative evidence suggests that political polarization in the U.S. is mainly driven by strong political/cultural initiatives in the Democratic party.

Details

Title
The great divide: drivers of polarization in the US public
Author
Böttcher, Lucas 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Gersbach, Hans 2 

1  UCLA, Department of Computational Medicine, Los Angeles, US (GRID:grid.19006.3e) (ISNI:0000 0000 9632 6718); ETH Zurich, Institute for Theoretical Physics, Zurich, Switzerland (GRID:grid.5801.c) (ISNI:0000 0001 2156 2780); ETH Zurich, Center of Economic Research, Zurich, Switzerland (GRID:grid.5801.c) (ISNI:0000 0001 2156 2780) 
2  ETH Zurich, Center of Economic Research, Zurich, Switzerland (GRID:grid.5801.c) (ISNI:0000 0001 2156 2780) 
Pages
32
Publication year
2020
Publication date
2020
Publisher
Springer Nature B.V.
e-ISSN
21931127
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-020-00249-4
ProQuest document ID
2471440575
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2020. This work is published under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.