ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
How digital media drive affective polarization through partisan sorting.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed.
- Toward an integrated and globally equitable understanding of political polarization.Nature communications · 2026Review
- The effects of political advertising on Facebook and Instagram before the 2020 US election.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Natural language reveals that political partisans are more affectively aligned over political issues than partisan identities.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- The evolving study of political polarization.Open research Europe · 2026Review
- Physical partisan proximity outweighs online ties in predicting US voting outcomes.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Charting multidimensional ideological polarization across demographic groups in the USA.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Defusing political animosity in the United States with a cooperative online quiz game.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- How advocacy groups on Twitter and media coverage can drive US firearm acquisition: A causal study.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- How out-group animosity can shape partisan divisions: A model of affective polarization.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Media technology is not the culprit: Factors influencing users' quarrelsome behavior in political social platform use.PloS one · 2025Article
- A multilevel network approach to revealing patterns of online political selective exposure.PloS one · 2025Article
- Navigating the cohesion-diversity trade-off: understanding the role of facilitators in co-creation using agent-based modelling.Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences · 2024Article
- Patterns of partisan toxicity and engagement reveal the common structure of online political communication across countries.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Article
- Social Drivers and Algorithmic Mechanisms on Digital Media.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Review
- A theoretical framework for polarization as the gradual fragmentation of a divided society.Communications psychology · 2024Review
- Article
- Same old story with a different ending: Homophily and preferential selection of information within the US climate policy network.PloS one · 2024Article
- Article
- How social reinforcement learning can lead to metastable polarisation and the voter model.PloS one · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author.
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Abstract
Politics has in recent decades entered an era of intense polarization. Explanations have implicated digital media, with the so-called echo chamber remaining a dominant causal hypothesis despite growing challenge by empirical evidence. This paper suggests that this mounting evidence provides not only reason to reject the echo chamber hypothesis but also the foundation for an alternative causal mechanism. To propose such a mechanism, the paper draws on the literatures on affective polarization, digital media, and opinion dynamics. From the affective polarization literature, we follow the move from seeing polarization as diverging issue positions to rooted in sorting: an alignment of differences which is effectively dividing the electorate into two increasingly homogeneous megaparties. To explain the rise in sorting, the paper draws on opinion dynamics and digital media research to present a model which essentially turns the echo chamber on its head: it is not isolation from opposing views that drives polarization but precisely the fact that digital media bring us to interact outside our local bubble. When individuals interact locally, the outcome is a stable plural patchwork of cross-cutting conflicts. By encouraging nonlocal interaction, digital media drive an alignment of conflicts along partisan lines, thus effacing the counterbalancing effects of local heterogeneity. The result is polarization, even if individual interaction leads to convergence. The model thus suggests that digital media polarize through partisan sorting, creating a maelstrom in which more and more identities, beliefs, and cultural preferences become drawn into an all-encompassing societal division.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.