Polarization in increasingly connected societies.

Abstract

Explanations of societal polarization often rely on one of three mechanisms: homophily, bounded confidence, and community-based interactions. Opinion dynamics models based on these mechanisms consider the lack of interactions as the main cause of polarization. Given the increasing connectivity in modern society, this explanation of polarization may be insufficient. To understand how society becomes more polarized as its connectedness increases, we propose a voter-type model (called I-voter) that incorporates involvement as a key mechanism in opinion formation and study its dependence on the network connectivity. We describe the steady-state behavior of the model analytically, at the mean-field and the moment-hierarchy levels, and stress the generality of our findings by considering various extensions and different network topologies.