Polarization and tipping points
Polarization and tipping points
复制标题
DOI：
10.1073/pnas.2102144118
复制
发表时间：
2021-12-14
影响因子：
11.1
通讯作者：
Szymanski, Boleslaw K.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Macy, Michael W.;Ma, Manqing;Szymanski, Boleslaw K.
研究表明，党派分歧和极端主义立场日益加剧，在政治精英中比在选民中更为明显。人们现在开始关注如何减弱极化。我们使用一个一般模型的意见改变，看看是否影响力和同质性的自我强化动态可能会被特点的转折点，使可逆性的问题。这一模式适用于立法机构或其他规模小、联系紧密的组织，但并不假定有国家特有的体制安排，因为这种安排会模糊对阶段过渡中基本要素的识别。在该模型中的代理人最初随机的位置在一个多维的问题空间，包括在两个相等大小的政党和10个问题的立场之一的成员。然后，代理人通过向附近的邻居靠拢并远离他们不同意的人来更新他们的问题立场，这取决于代理人对分歧的容忍度和与他们对问题的意识形态承诺相比的党派认同的强度。我们进行了计算实验中，我们操纵代理人的容忍分歧和强度的一方识别。重要的是，我们还引入了与针对共同威胁产生共同利益的事件相对应的外生冲击（例如，全球流行病）。政治极化的相图揭示了难以预测的过渡，可能是不可逆的，由于不对称的滞后轨迹。我们的结论是，未来的实证研究需要更加密切地关注临界点的识别和可能的对策的有效性。
Research has documented increasing partisan division and extremist positions that are more pronounced among political elites than among voters. Attention has now begun to focus on how polarization might be attenuated. We use a general model of opinion change to see if the self-reinforcing dynamics of influence and homophily may be characterized by tipping points that make reversibility problematic. The model applies to a legislative body or other small, densely connected organization, but does not assume country-specific institutional arrangements that would obscure the identification of fundamental regularities in the phase transitions. Agents in the model have initially random locations in a multidimensional issue space consisting of membership in one of two equal-sized parties and positions on 10 issues. Agents then update their issue positions by moving closer to nearby neighbors and farther from those with whom they disagree, depending on the agents' tolerance of disagreement and strength of party identification compared to their ideological commitment to the issues. We conducted computational experiments in which we manipulated agents' tolerance for disagreement and strength of party identification. Importantly, we also introduced exogenous shocks corresponding to events that create a shared interest against a common threat (e.g., a global pandemic). Phase diagrams of political polarization reveal difficult-to-predict transitions that can be irreversible due to asymmetric hysteresis trajectories. We conclude that future empirical research needs to pay much closer attention to the identification of tipping points and the effectiveness of possible countermeasures.