Emergence of polarized ideological opinions in multidimensional topic spaces
2020
Opinion polarization is on the rise, causing concerns for the openness of public debates. Additionally, extreme opinions on different topics often show significant correlations. The dynamics leading to these polarized ideological opinions pose a challenge: How can such correlations emerge, without assuming them a priori in the individual preferences or in a preexisting social structure? Here we propose a simple model that reproduces ideological opinion states found in survey data, even between rather unrelated, but sufficiently controversial, topics. Inspired by skew coordinate systems recently proposed in natural language processing models, we solidify these intuitions in a formalism where opinions evolve in a multidimensional space where topics form a non-orthogonal basis. The model features a phase transition between consensus, opinion polarization, and ideological states, which we analytically characterize as a function of the controversialness and overlap of the topics. Our findings shed light upon the mechanisms driving the emergence of ideology in the formation of opinions.
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