The United States and much of the world are experiencing a loss of diversity that threatens the stability of democracy and society, according to a series of new studies. The studies examine political polarization as a collection of complex ever-evolving systems, and were conducted by interdisciplinary teams of political scientists and complex systems theorists. The school of public and international affairs has a credit.
The United States and much of the world are experiencing a catastrophic loss of diversity that threatens the resilience of democracy, according to a series of new studies.
The teams of political scientists and complex systems theorists looked at how the actions and interactions of individual voters, people in power, and various social networks can influence the production and influence of polarization. The political system becomes incapable of addressing the range of issues, or formulating the variety of solutions, necessary for government to function and provide the services critical for society as social interactions and individual decisions isolated people into only a few intractable camps.
The studies were published in a special issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which was a result of a collaboration between Arizona State University and Princeton University.
The loss of diversity associated with polarization undermines cooperation and the ability of societies to provide the public goods that make for a healthy society according to an introduction by issue editors.
They wrote that complexity theory can help us understand polarization. Diversity maintenance is important for many systems to thrive and survive.
The Center for BioComplexity is based in the High Meadow Environmental Institute and is led by the director, who said that complex adaptive systems are widespread in fields from physics and financial systems to natural systems driven by evolution and socio-political systems.
"These systems are composed of individual agents, in which there is an interplay, and perhaps a coevolution, between the attitudes and actions of individual agents and the properties of the systems to which they belong," he said. The need for a statistical mechanics to scale from individuals to collectives is one of the challenges that exist in these applications.
Despite the rise of partisanship, populism and polarization, these phenomena have not been thoroughly studied as dynamic systems consisting of multiple interacting components and large-scale features.
James Madison hoped that the system he created in the Constitution would prevent the kind of political infighting that can undermine the workings of government.
"Unfortunately, we are seeing a loss of diversity in the range of positions in society within the United States and globally," she said. The hope is that the papers in this issue will show how understanding the forces that lead to polarization will lead to better governance.
The studies were done by researchers at Princeton. The papers looked at issues such as how to ensure successful electoral reforms using models, how public opinion fuels extremism among political elites, as well as the potential benefits of polarization under the right circumstances.
People polarize themselves by abandoning followers that are considered unreliable.
A model was created to show that users of social media may sort themselves into networks based on what they consider to be trustworthy news sources. Andy Guess, assistant professor of politics and public affairs, Corina Tarnita, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, and first author Christopher Tokita, received their PhDs from Princeton.
Users who constantly share and react to their preferred news sources are more likely to develop politically isolated networks. Users miss out on more news articles when they are in the bubbles.
It's not hard to find evidence of differing opinions on social media, but we don't know how social media can drive people apart. Our contribution is to show how people organize their feeds on online social networks. This can happen even without knowing other users' partisan identities.
Conservative swings in public opinion can lead to Republican lawmaker extremism.
The current extremists of Republican members of the U.S. Congress are linked to public opinion. Naomi Ehrich Leonard, a professor of mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Princeton, and a professor of political science at Queens College, CUNY, conducted a study that found Americans are not as divided as people think.
The researchers found that over time, conservative swings in public opinionexacerbate the self-reinforcement processes for Republican lawmakers, and that legislators respond to favorable public opinion by further bolstering their own positions. The tipping point for the process of polarization was identified when the forces driving it are compounded and the forces that mitigated it are overwhelmed. Democrats are approaching the critical threshold while Republicans are not.
Leonard said that they were able to make new discoveries about the mechanisms that can explain and potentially mitigate political polarization by combining their expertise on political processes with their expertise on feedback and nonlinearity.
She said that the ways in which public opinion changes over time had not been implicated in the political polarization of lawmakers. By accounting for the differences in how lawmakers respond to public opinion, we show that they matter and that small differences in public opinion can lead to large changes in polarization. The analytical tools we developed for this study will be useful in slowing down the trend.
Social tensions are fueling polarization.
The paper was co-authored by Nolan McCarty, a professor of Politics and Public Affairs, and Joshua Plotkin, a professor of natural resources. The findings suggest that progressive taxation designed to ensure an adequate social safety net could help prevent the economic anxieties that fuel ethnic and racial conflict.
The United States and many other countries have experienced profound economic, social and political upheaval over the past 20 years. The paper is an attempt to understand the dynamics that link these developments and explore ways to break the negative cycle.
Personal attitudes can be influenced by the diversity of social networks.
The social networks to which people belong can "rewire" their personal attitudes over time to reflect the opinions of the people they're linked to, according to a study led by former Princeton fellow Fernando Santos, an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam.
The researchers found that when people connect to each other with similar opinions, they create an echo chamber that polarizes the views of everyone in the network. People who are part of a network of people with different viewpoints tend to be more moderate. Understanding that social networks influence the way people think could be important in developing interventions to curb the spread of political extremism.
"This is a relatively new phenomenon, and like other internet and media mechanisms, has likely sped and reinforced the categorization of our societies," said Levin.
Society can benefit from polarization when opposing sides have diverse populations.
According to research led by the assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam and past research associate at the University of Princeton, polarization may benefit society when opposing viewpoints represent a variety of people and communities with shared values. When polarization excludes information about the preferences of people other than close neighbors, it becomes harmful. When local networks undermine the value of working with opponents, cooperation becomes less likely, which can result in the weakening of democratic processes.
Weber said that pluralistic societies thrive when members with different values and beliefs talk about their differences and come up with win-win solutions. The paper shows that the benefits of collective benefits are reduced by the fact that we don't agree on values.
Strong local attitudes can breed opposition.
According to research led by a graduate student in quantitative and computational biology, local variations in political attitudes can lead to polarization after political unrest. They used an adaptive voter model to determine how people's views of the European Union differed based on how people in their communities and social circles discussed revolutions, mass protests, and other political shocks.
The effect of revolutions on how people think about politics depends on the attitudes of the people with whom they talk about politics. Those who talk to supporters of the revolution are more likely to change their opinions than those who talk to opponents. In countries where most people support the goals of the revolution, there can be pockets of increased polarization.
Partisan interactions can weaken Madison's cure.
The study was led by Corina Tarnita, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, and was done with the help of a graduate student. The study was co-authored by Simon Levin, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Pennsylvania, and Yphtach Lelkes, an associate professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania.
James Madison argued in his essay "Federalist No. 10" that a republic should foster a diversity of political interests to mitigate the dangers of factions. Americans care more about political issues today than they did 75 years ago. The authors created a theoretical model of cultural evolution to investigate the possible role that interactions among partisan citizens play in this puzzle.
Madison believed that societal cohesion increases when individuals care about a greater variety of issues. Under extreme partisanship, individuals' openness to learning from peers with different political ideologies is diminished. This leads to increased tribalism that reduces interest diversity and leads to high within-ideology.
The researchers found a silver lining, that the harmful effects of extreme partisanship are only substantial when individuals are relying on social peers to shape their opinions and strategies. Tarnita said that the model suggests that learning from beyond one's social network is crucial to maintaining a cohesive society.
"Although both opinion formation and cooperation are well-discussed topics, we don't know much about the dynamics of cooperation and polarization," he said. The need to study polarization in a multi-level context was highlighted by the unexpected interactions we found between partisanship, cooperation and independent exploration.
Complex systems theory can lead to better design of lasting reforms to American democracy.
Sam Wang, professor of neuroscience and director of the Electoral Innovation Lab at Princeton, is the leader of an analysis that suggests the implications of democracy reforms may be better understood using dynamic systems theory.
Wang and a multi-institutional team of political scientists report that systems-based theory can help understand the many interactions that lead to current weaknesses in American democracy. Positive and negative feedback can help identify problems in representation and institutional power.
It is difficult to predict the effectiveness of a proposed reform against a backdrop of complex network interactions. A description of how electoral mechanisms interact can maximize the impacts of reforms in the context of politics and procedures of individual states.
Wang said that their main goal was to translate the American political system into a mathematical complex-systems framework that fosters participation by scholars of the natural sciences.
He said they want to encourage natural scientists to build models that reproduce political phenomena, create simulations to explore alternative scenarios, and design interventions that may improve the function of democracy. To understand a system of many parts well enough to make repairs or improvements is what these goals are about.
"The Dynamics of Political Polarization" was published in December by the National Academy of Sciences.
The National Academy of Sciences has a journal.
The collapse of democracy is similar to a natural system of loss of diversity.
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