This article accounts for two puzzling paradoxes. The first paradox is the simultaneous absence and presence of attitude polarization—the fact that global attitude polarization is relatively rare, even though pundits describe it as common. The second paradox is the simultaneous presence and absence of social polarization—the fact that while individuals experience attitude homogeneity in their interpersonal networks, their networks are characterized by attitude heterogeneity. These paradoxes give rise to numerous scholarly arguments. By developing a formal model of interpersonal influence over attitudes in a context where individuals hold simultaneous positions on multiple issues, we show why these arguments are not mutually exclusive and how they meaningfully refer to the same social setting. The results from this model provide a single parsimonious account for both paradoxes. The framework we develop may be generalized to a wider array of problems, including classic problems in collective action.

We estimated ideological preferences of 3.8 million Twitter users and, using a data set of nearly 150 million tweets concerning 12 political and nonpolitical issues, explored whether online communication resembles an "echo chamber" (as a result of selective exposure and ideological segregation) or a "national conversation." We observed that information was exchanged primarily among individuals with similar ideological preferences in the case of political issues (e.g., 2012 presidential election, 2013 government shutdown) but not many other current events (e.g., 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, 2014 Super Bowl). Discussion of the Newtown shootings in 2012 reflected a dynamic process, beginning as a national conversation before transforming into a polarized exchange. With respect to both political and nonpolitical issues, liberals were more likely than conservatives to engage in cross-ideological dissemination; this is an important asymmetry with respect to the structure of communication that is consistent with psychological theory and research bearing on ideological differences in epistemic, existential, and relational motivation. Overall, we conclude that previous work may have overestimated the degree of ideological segregation in social-media usage. © The Author(s) 2015.

We present a model of opinion dynamics in which agents adjust continuous opinions as a result of random binary encounters whenever their difference in opinion is below a given threshold. High thresholds yield convergence of opinions towards an average opinion, whereas low thresholds result in several opinion clusters: members of the same cluster share the same opinion but are no longer influenced by members of other clusters.

What are the relational dimensions of politics? Does the way that people and organizations are connected to each other matter? Are our opinions affected by the people with whom we talk? Are legislators affected by lobbyists? Is the capacity of social movements to mobilize affected by the structure of societal networks? Powerful evidence in the literature answers each of these questions in the affirmative. However, compared to other paradigmatic foci, political science has invested tiny amounts of capacity in the study of the relevance of networks to political phenomena. Far more attention has been paid to the psychology of how people process information individually as opposed to collectively, and to the role that institutions play in structuring politics as opposed to the relational undergirdings of politics. A review of the flagship journals in political science reveals a dearth of articles on networks. Few, if any, doctoral programs include courses for which the primary focus is network-related ideas, and even the notion of a relational dependence in data is rarely mentioned in discussions of the assumptions embedded in the statistical methods that dominate political science.

The distinction between a person’s ideological identity and their issue positions has come more clearly into focus in recent research. Scholars have pointed out a significant difference between identity-based and issue-based ideology in the American electorate. However, the affective and social effects of these separate elements of ideology have not been sufficiently explored. Drawing on a national sample collected by SSI and data from the 2016 ANES, this article finds that the identity-based elements of ideology are capable of driving heightened levels of affective polarization against outgroup ideologues, even at low levels of policy attitude extremity or constraint. These findings demonstrate how Americans can use ideological terms to disparage political opponents without necessarily holding constrained sets of policy attitudes.

In this paper, a rational choice model of the dynamics of public attention to politically relevant issues is proposed, responding to the following research questions: When and why does public attention arise in the.rst place? Do ‘issue attention cycles’ really exist? What issues are likely to attain which degree of public attention? How can public attention be measured soundly? In which way does public attention in.uence regulatory action, and how, in turn, is public attention affected by political action? To this end, the paper sets off with a discussion of the concepts of ‘public’, ‘issue’, ‘attention’ and ‘cycle’. Key variables of the causal model include the acuteness/severity and accessibility/visibility of the issue at stake, as well as the ability to ‘solve’ the underlying problem. In an empirical study, several environmental issues and their corresponding regulation in Germany are examined in order to test the theoretical conjectures which could, for the most part, be empirically supported.

Word embeddings, the coefficients from neural network models predicting the use of words in context, have now become inescapable in applications involving natural language processing. Despite a few studies in political science, the potential of this methodology for the analysis of political texts has yet to be fully uncovered. This paper introduces models of word embeddings augmented with political metadata and trained on large-scale parliamentary corpora from Britain, Canada, and the United States. We fit these models with indicator variables of the party affiliation of members of parliament, which we refer to as party embeddings. We illustrate how these embeddings can be used to produce scaling estimates of ideological placement and other quantities of interest for political research. To validate the methodology, we assess our results against indicators from the Comparative Manifestos Project, surveys of experts, and measures based on roll-call votes. Our findings suggest that party embeddings are successful at capturing latent concepts such as ideology, and the approach provides researchers with an integrated framework for studying political language.

Starting from a critique of Durkheim and Althusser a theory of the genera tion (production) and reproduction of ideology is developed. In a primary process practice gives rise to spontaneous ideology. In a secondary pro cess of sedimentation and elaboration social forms and systematic ideologies act back on the primary process. Hegemonic ideology ex pressing ultimate values and Weltanschauung is related to class ideology, political and religious ideology and to spontaneous forms of conscious ness.