New computational model suggests the existence of polarization tipping-points

Politics around the world has in recent decades entered an era of political polarization, in which politics appears like a struggle between warring tribes. An interdisciplinary team of sociologists and physicists developed a computational model to analyse this rise in political temperature. They used their model to examine the potential link between social media and polarization and suggest the existence of polarization tipping-points, which can lead to run-away polarization. The results are now published in PLOS ONE. An interdisciplinary team of sociologists and physicists from the University of Amsterdam, the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, and the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden developed a computational model that contributes to deepening our understanding of the dynamics of political polarization, and may help us find ways of avoiding a dangerous rise in societal conflict. Rising political polarization. Politics around the world have entered an era of unprecedented political polarization. We see this in harshening debates, political fragmentation, and growing difficulty to find political compromise. Such polarization can have dangerous consequences. It can lead to a loss of public trust in governments and institutions, intensifying conflict between groups in society, and even democratic backsliding. Recent research in political science has linked this political polarization to shifting political identities: disagreement over opinions have become secondary to a process where political identity comes to engulf and align with other social identities. Rather than rational debates over policy disagreements, politics thereby becomes more like a struggle between warring tribes, in which one tribe 'wins' and one 'loses'. A computational model to examine the societal dynamics of identity and political polarization