Research

Political polarization in western societies

Western political polarization is more plausibly explained by decades of structural factors — economic inequality, elite strategy, and institutional decay — than by social media, which the strongest available evidence suggests amplifies pre-existing divisions rather than causing them; yet causation remains genuinely unresolved, and right-leaning, libertarian, and individual-agency accounts (regulatory backlash, cultural coercion driving counter-mobilization) are structurally absent from this brief and should be treated as live, not refuted. Non-Western comparative cases — Rwanda's anti-divisionism law, Brazil's participatory budgeting, Indonesia's Pancasila mediation — suggest that constitutional power-sharing and local conflict infrastructure reduce affective polarization more reliably than platform regulation, though these models carry their own authoritarian risks the brief underweights. The most underreported finding is psychological: ordinary partisans dramatically overestimate opposing voters' extremism, affective "zero ratings" of the opposing party rose fivefold between 2000 and 2020, and presenting corrective data to numerate individuals tends to deepen rather than reduce polarization — meaning the crisis may be as much one of misperception and broken meaning-making institutions as of genuine ideological divergence.