Publication
Social polarization is a growing concern worldwide, as it strains social relations, erodes trust in institutions, and thus hurts democratic societies. Polarization has been traditionally studied in binary conflicts where two groups support opposite ideas.
However, in many social systems, such as multi-party democracies, political conflicts involve multiple dissenting factions. Despite the prevalence of multipolar systems, there is still a lack of suitable analytical tools to study their polarization patterns.
In this work, we introduce new polarization metrics for multidimensional scenarios and develop a methodology that extracts the ideological structure of multipolar contexts from social networks. We propose the trace of the covariance matrix (the total variation) of the multipolar opinion distribution as a measure of global polarization, and its eigendecomposition to identify the directions of maximum polarization. Instead of using a pre-conceived opinion space (conservative vs progressive, liberal vs authoritarian, etc.), our framework reveals the natural ideological axes of the system.
We apply our methodology to quadripolar and pentapolar real-world democratic processes, finding non-trivial ideological structures with clear connections to the underlying social context.
Our framework opens new avenues for understanding multilateral social tensions and facing the challenges of polarization in a unified way.
S. Martin-Gutierrez, J. C. Losada, R. M. Benito, Multipolar social systems: Measuring polarization beyond dichotomous contexts, Chaos, Solitons & Fractals 169 (2023) 113244.
Related
Signup
Cookie | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|
cookielawinfo-checkbox-analytics | 1 year | Set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin, this cookie records the user consent for the cookies in the "Analytics" category. |
cookielawinfo-checkbox-functional | 1 year | The GDPR Cookie Consent plugin sets the cookie to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". |
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary | 1 year | Set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin, this cookie records the user consent for the cookies in the "Necessary" category. |
CookieLawInfoConsent | 1 year | CookieYes sets this cookie to record the default button state of the corresponding category and the status of CCPA. It works only in coordination with the primary cookie. |
PHPSESSID | session | This cookie is native to PHP applications. The cookie stores and identifies a user's unique session ID to manage user sessions on the website. The cookie is a session cookie and will be deleted when all the browser windows are closed. |
viewed_cookie_policy | 1 year | The GDPR Cookie Consent plugin sets the cookie to store whether or not the user has consented to use cookies. It does not store any personal data. |
Cookie | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|
mec_cart | 1 month | Provides functionality for our ticket shop |
VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE | 6 months | YouTube sets this cookie to measure bandwidth, determining whether the user gets the new or old player interface. |
VISITOR_PRIVACY_METADATA | 6 months | YouTube sets this cookie to store the user's cookie consent state for the current domain. |
YSC | session | Youtube sets this cookie to track the views of embedded videos on Youtube pages. |
yt-remote-connected-devices | never | YouTube sets this cookie to store the user's video preferences using embedded YouTube videos. |
yt-remote-device-id | never | YouTube sets this cookie to store the user's video preferences using embedded YouTube videos. |
yt.innertube::nextId | never | YouTube sets this cookie to register a unique ID to store data on what videos from YouTube the user has seen. |
yt.innertube::requests | never | YouTube sets this cookie to register a unique ID to store data on what videos from YouTube the user has seen. |
Cookie | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|
_ga | 1 year | Google Analytics sets this cookie to calculate visitor, session and campaign data and track site usage for the site's analytics report. The cookie stores information anonymously and assigns a randomly generated number to recognise unique visitors. |
_ga_* | 1 year | Google Analytics sets this cookie to store and count page views. |
_gat_gtag_UA_* | 1 min | Google Analytics sets this cookie to store a unique user ID. |
_gid | 1 day | Google Analytics sets this cookie to store information on how visitors use a website while also creating an analytics report of the website's performance. Some of the collected data includes the number of visitors, their source, and the pages they visit anonymously. |