Pluralistic Collapse: The “Oil Spill” Model of Mass Opinion Polarization

“…update their own beliefs and practices to maintain consistency with these mental maps and avoid cognitive strain, aggregate belief structures can be expected—at least to a modest extent—to shape individual beliefs (Festinger 1957; Goldberg and Stein 2018; Heider 1946; Hunzaker 2016; Kunda 1990).”

“cal positions, values, and cultural preferences (21), the result is”

“…processes of belief formation and change for a population, such as examining the association between theoretically related values (Baldassarri and Gelman 2008; Boutyline and Vaisey 2017; DellaPosta 2020) or looking at changes in the distribution of responses over time (DiMaggio et al. 1996).”

“public may increase due to the already strong affective polarization, rising social inequality, and the collapse of cross-cutting belief structures into consolidated clusters [6,7].”

“As research using survey data has shown, this means that opinions are not so much diverging as they are becoming clustered and interlinked [77].”

“For example, evidence from the United States suggests that the political belief system in the United States is expanding to more issues and opinions over the last decades (DellaPosta, 2020; see also work on conflict extension, Layman & Carsey, 2002; Layman et al., 2010).”

“Processes of social constraint and belief consolidation may further contribute to overlap of political and religious perspectives over time (Baldassarri and Gelman 2008; Boutyline and Vaisey 2017; DellaPosta 2020).”

“…on key issues (Baldassarri and Gelman 2008); partisans increasingly dislike each other (Iyengar et al. 2019); and individuals’ political beliefs have become more interconnected and therefore likely constrained in their ability to change (Axelrod, Daymude, and Forrest 2021; DellaPosta 2020).”

“SimulationswithanIsing-likemodelrevealtheconsequentdestabilizingofa pluralist equilibrium, allowing pluralism to collapse into bifurcation, as has happened in the US in recent decades 47,48 .”

“Scholars identify opinion polarization as a major concern because it can lead to extremism and social chaos [23,24].”

“…party lines (Levendusky 2009); social cleavages by political ideology extend to a growing array of public opinions (Baldassarri and Gelman 2008; DellaPosta 2020) and life-styles (DellaPosta, Shi, and Macy 2015) and have led to segregated social networks and tensions in relationships, including…”

“While some papers have argued that the decreasing dimensionality of issue attitudes (8, 9) is at the core of current political tensions, any demonstrated relationship between dimensionality reduction and polarization has been merely correlational.”

“…rhetoric is crystallizing among citizens: conversations about the severity of COVID-19 are often bundled with preexisting partisan debates regarding the role of government (Bhanot and Hopkins, 2020; Collignon et al., 2021; DellaPosta, 2020; Gollwitzer et al., 2020; Grossman et al., 2020).”

“…can result from the twin-mechanisms of homophily, a phenomenon that spans the social and biological sciences (Fu et al., 2012; McPherson et al., 2001), and social influence or the diffusion of pairs of associated beliefs (DellaPosta, 2020; DellaPosta et al., 2015; Goldberg and Stein, 2018).”

“Such ideological labels—that is, Democrat versus Republican, but perhaps even more clearly liberal versus conservative (see Boutyline and Vaisey 2017:1413; DellaPosta et al. 2015)—have become so-called mega-identities (Finkel et al. 2020; Mason 2018:14).”

“…polarization found in the literature, we use the concept of polarization in a simple sociological sense to refer to a temporal process regarding whether social and political differentiation of media usage has become more sharply pronounced over time (e.g. DellaPosta, 2020; DiMaggio et al., 1996).”

“…trait of affective polarization is that it extends to domains of life that would generally be considered removed from politics, such as health-related decisions to wear a mask or get vaccinated (Druckman et al. 2021) and possibly lifestyles (DellaPosta, Shi, and Macy 2015; DellaPosta 2020).”

“…climate in many countries, when citizens’ political identities are constantly activated (Settle, 2018) and when numerous ostensibly non-political issues and events become associated with politics (DellaPosta, 2020), it may be increasingly difficult to shift individual opinions and beliefs.”

“The growing followership of con-spiracy theories (Rao & Greve, 2024; Sutton & Douglas, 2020) and evidence that social sorting encompasses more and more previously apolitical areas of life (DellaPosta, 2020) point in this direction.”

“To date, attitude constraint has been inferred in cross-sectional surveys by examining the alignment of attitudes within groups (e.g., Baldassarri and Bearman 2007; DellaPosta 2020).”

“…century have conceptualized political beliefs in network terms (Converse 1964) and have recently begun to study the structure of such beliefs inductively using network analytic methods (Baldassarri and Goldberg 2014; Boutyline and Vaisey 2017; DellaPosta 2020; DiMaggio and Goldberg 2018).”

“there is increasing concern about the ability of these platforms to polarize and divide us [3, 14, 18, 20, 23].”

“Although not tied explicitly to health, a growing share of this research emphasizes the overlap, or not, of value systems among various subpopulations (DellaPosta 2020; DellaPosta, Shi, and Macy 2015).”

“As such, it is possible that anti-vaccine beliefs may “contaminate” other domains in an “oil-spill” model of belief consolidation (DellaPosta, 2020), or that they represent a larger latent construct around health misperceptions.”

“Such a process is suggested by the “oil spill” model of polarization, in which clusters of initially disparate issues – including cultural and moral issues – become connected in a belief system (DellaPosta, 2020).”

“MFT was developed to better understand political polarization (Haidt 2012; cf. Morson and Shapiro 2021), but polarization cuts across political, religious, and other ideological affiliations (DellaPosta 2020; Whitehead and Perry 2020).”

“According to [2], polarization results from individuals forming “broad and encompassing clusters organized around cohesive packages of beliefs”.”

“Growing distance between partisans, whether in their attitudes, lifestyles, or relations, has eroded the cross-ties that once tempered partisan conflict [8].”

“Bymanymeasures,theAmericanpoliticalspherehasbecome increasinglypolarizedinrecentdecades 69,70 , especially among political elites 71,72 .”

“More recently, DellaPosta (2020) expanded belief network analysis to study the dynamics of belief networks.”

“Daniel DellaPosta (2020) has recently used the metaphor of an ‘oil spill’ to illustrate how moral and political divisions have not only become more accentuated but also started to bring along with them many areas of life, such as choices or tastes for food, clothing or music, that were…”

“…analysis, where co-occurrence relations among objects, words, beliefs, products, and other cultural symbols are represented as networks to show how these relationships cohere in larger systems of meaning (e.g., Boutyline and Vaisey 2017; DellaPosta 2020; DiMaggio 2011; Pachucki and Breiger 2010).”

“The broadening of partisan divisions to incorporate an ever-wider array of previously apolitical topics lends a strong degree of truth to partisan stereotypes of “latte liberals” and “country music conservatives” 12,13,22 .”

“…interaction” (Baldassarri and Bearman 2007:785) by highlighting the on-the-ground mechanisms through which mass public opinion becomes (and, in some cases, remains) polarized, especially through belief consolidation (DellaPosta 2020) and interpersonal influence (Baldassarri and Bearman 2007).”

“According to the ‘Oil-spill model’ (DellaPosta 2020), polarization unfolds by leading political opinions to align with a broader set of preferences, spilling over to cultural fields.”

“…consumption) are available (e.g., in secondary data), they should still be utilized as they produce directionally expected (see Wright, 2011, 2014, 2020) correlations with U.S. women’s sexual attitudes and behaviors that (in the aggregate–see present study’s meta-analysis results as well as…”

“By comparing belief system networks across 38 countries based on data from ten waves of the European Social Surveys (2002–2020), this paper reveals that national-level belief systems are characterized by substantially large differences in overall constraint, 1 and that these differences remain…”

“In these models, a node is “an element of a person’s belief system” [59], which the related literature names slightly differently, such as “opinions” [49], “concepts” [62] “attitudes” [49, 59, 64], “beliefs” [62, 50, 59], or “positions” [63, 64].”

“Daniel DellaPosta, Yongren Shi, and Michael Macy (2015) explain how that happens and the resulting social structure: “[T]he self-reinforcing dynamics of homophily and influence dramatically amplify even very small elective affinities between lifestyle and ideology, producing a stereotypical world of ‘latte liberals’ a…”

“At the individual level, if local sociopolitical issues are increasingly interpreted through a hyperpartisan, nationalized lens (DellaPosta 2020), then local readers are less aware of their civic and economic ties to rural areas, leaving them with fewer opportunities to find common ground with…”

“The pornography, sexual attitude, and sexual behavior measures used by P. J. Wright (2013) are listed and described in Table 2 (including the GSS names for the measures, as is common among GSS analysts – Davis, 2013; DellaPosta, 2020; Hammond, 1986).”

“The U.S. audience have become more and more polarized in opinion and expression, and the gap between the liberals and conservatives in the U.S. is growing due to political ideology and partisanship (DellaPosta, 2020; PewResearchCenter, 2020).”

“This division largely reflects the idea of political lifestyle polarisation and the connection between political and cultural attitudes in the Global North (DellaPosta 2020; Flanagan and Lee 2003).”

“It is also consistent with the observation that issue alignment has increasedamongtheUSelectorateoverthelastdecades(Kozlowski&Murphy2021;DellaPosta2020),inparallel to an increase in hostile feelings towards political opponents (Mason 2015).”

“While social network methods usually try to provide a structure of the social connections among the studied population, belief networks provide information about the structural organization of belief systems (Boutyline and Vaisey, 2017; DellaPosta, 2020; Brandt et al. 2019; Kertzer et al. 2019).”

“…and lifestyle preferences, addressing it with several different expressions, such as “lifestyle politics” (DellaPosta, Shi, and Macy 2015), “politicultural sorting” (Rogers 2022), “the oil-spill” (DellaPosta 2020; Rawlings and Childress 2024), and “lifestyle polarization” (Talaifar et al. 2024).”

“The political polarization of other climate attitudes suggests that preparedness actions may be politically polarized in the same way (DellaPosta 2020; Salil, Azevedo, and Holman 2022).”

“Polarisation also influences the political culture wherein an increasing number of citizens accept undemocratic measures against dissent and political pluralism becomes increasingly hard to maintain (DellaPosta 2020).”

“…to examine the environmental consequences of affective polarization, partly because it has been framed as a feature of interpersonal life, influencing friendships, dating, and marriage (Iyengar and Krupenkin 2018; Iyengar et al. 2019; see also DellaPosta 2020; Hahl, Kim, and Zuckerman Sivan 2018).”

“First, although formal analyses of culture (Mohr 1998; Martin 2002; Baldassarri and Goldberg 2014; Boutyline and Vaisey 2017; DellaPosta 2020) at identifying general patterns from the data (e.g., latent class analysis), here we have deductively formulated an analytically meaningful patterning of…”

“…studies have shown that public discourse around issues of gender and sexuality has become more polarized over time (Baldassarri and Gelman 2008; DellaPosta 2020; Finkel et al. 2020), in-depth interviews with eighty-five activists highlighted some surprising convergence in how US activists on…”

“Furthermore, it is unknown whether Bayesian belief polarization processes contribute to the real-world increases in political issue polarization that have been well-documented in the US (DellaPosta, 2020; Dimock et al., 2014; Webster & Abramowitz, 2017).”

“Polarization stems from individuals forming broad and encompassing clusters organized around cohesive packages of polotical beliefs [2].”

“…of the digital as arena of the public sphere in which even political fi gures do not shy away from utilising initially apolitical characteristics, such as taste in music, leisure, or aesthetic choices as signals for more profound beliefs and preferences thus politicising them (DellaPosta 2020).”

“…a higher chance, the two conditions can also generate even more extreme polarization, which is in line with the current findings of partisan polarization in apolitical issues (e.g., latte-drinking liberals vs bird-hunting conservatives) (DellaPosta, 2020; DellaPosta et al., 2015; Shi et al., 2017).”

“Sociologists have explored how changes in the propensity of individuals to increasingly dislike and distrust members of opposing political parties affect society (DellaPosta, 2020).”