An Argument Communication Model of Polarization and Ideological Alignment

Abstract

A multi-level model of opinion formation is presented which takes into account that attitudes on different issues are usually not independent. In the model, agents exchange beliefs regarding a series of facts. A cognitive structure of evaluative associations links different (partially overlapping) sets of facts to different political issues and determines an agents' attitudinal positions in a way borrowed from expectancy value theory. If agents preferentially interact with other agents that hold similar attitudes on one or several issues, this leads to biased argument pools and polarization in the sense that groups of agents selectively belief in distinct subsets of facts. Besides the emergence of a bi-modal distribution of opinions on single issues that most previous opinion polarization models address, our model also accounts for the alignment of attitudes across several issues along ideological dimensions.

See www.universecity.de/demos/SCSIssueAlignment.html for an interactive online demonstration. This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 732942 (Opinion Dynamics and Cultural Conflict in European Spaces -- www.Odycceus.eu)

References in corpus (3)

• Statistical physics of social dynamics
• Changing minds about electric cars: An empirically grounded agent-based modeling approach
• From Microscopic Heterogeneity to Macroscopic Complexity in the Contrarian Voter Model

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Opinion Dynamics of Online Social Network Users: A Micro-Level Analysis
• Linking theory and empirics: a general framework to model opinion formation processes
• Natural-Language Multi-Agent Simulations of Argumentative Opinion Dynamics
• The rise of populism and the reconfiguration of the German political space
• Facilitating on-line opinion dynamics by mining expressions of causation. The case of climate change debates on The Guardian