Opinion Polarization

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Lee et. all 2014 Background: For the past few years, even decades, editorials, opinion pieces, and political commentators alike have announced and decried increasing political polarization in the United States, especially as demonstrated by the stark, divisive contrasts in recent election results. Online space is also found to be divided into left and right clusters in recent studies. This study tests the relationships between social media, social network service network heterogeneity, and opinion polarization. Questions/Expectations: The overarching question: does social media facilitate or attenuate polarization? The investigators identify and test two competing expectations about polarization. Expectation 1: individuals are more likely …show more content…

In this study, the researchers identify and consider three different dimensions of opinion polarization: political, ideological, and issue. To measure political polarization the researchers used the difference between the feeling thermometer index, rated between 0-100, of political parties of Democrat and Republican and calculating absolute values. For ideological polarization, they used the folded value of respondents’ answer to a question of political ideology. To measure issue polarization about specific issues, researchers used two questions asking favorability about same-sex marriage and the health care reform and calculating the absolute values of …show more content…

Lee et al. also found that the relationship between general social media use and the network heterogeneity on SNSs is mediated by specific SNSs usage patterns, such as getting news, posting news, and talking about politics. The most surprising finding by the researchers was that a higher level of SNS diversity led to more partisanship polarization for individuals participating in more political discussions whereas it had almost no effects on partisanship polarization for those joining fewer political discussions, and a similar pattern appears for ideological polarization. In fact, the researchers found that SNS network heterogeneity matters only so long as political discussion is taken into consideration in relationship with partisanship and ideology polarization. However, the same pattern was not observed for the two dependent variables of issue polarization: there were no significant moderation effects of political discussion for attitude polarization about same-sex marriage and health care

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