The DOI matches its Crossref record; 113 of the 113 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Pluralistic Collapse: The “Oil Spill” Model of Mass Opinion Polarization
Abstract
Despite widespread feeling that public opinion in the United States has become dramatically polarized along political lines, empirical support for such a pattern is surprisingly elusive. Reporting little evidence of mass polarization, previous studies assume polarization is evidenced via the amplification of existing political alignments. This article considers a different pathway: polarization occurring via social, cultural, and political alignments coming to encompass an increasingly diverse array of opinions and attitudes. The study uses 44 years of data from the General Social Survey representing opinions and attitudes across a wide array of domains as elements in an evolving belief network. Analyses of this network produce evidence that mass polarization has increased via a process of belief consolidation, entailing the collapse of previously cross-cutting alignments, thus creating increasingly broad and encompassing clusters organized around cohesive packages of beliefs. Further, the increasing salience of political ideology and partisanship only partly explains this trend. The structure of U.S. opinion has shifted in ways suggesting troubling implications for proponents of political and social pluralism.
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Cites
Collective dynamics of ‘small-world’ networks
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The case for motivated reasoning.
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“…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).”
Background
Research works printed but not linked: 4
- Boutyline Andrei, 2017, Sociological Science, 4
- 10.2307/2579105 · DOI
- Levitsky Steven, 2018, How Democracies Die
- Marx Karl, 1978, The Marx-Engels Reader
Cited by
Sorted by citations
How digital media drive affective polarization through partisan sorting
Törnberg, P. (2022) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.2207159119 · Cited by 288
“cal positions, values, and cultural preferences (21), the result is”
BackgroundMeasuring Stability and Change in Personal Culture Using Panel Data
Kiley, K., & Vaisey, S. (2020) · American Sociological Review · doi:10.1177/0003122420921538 · Cited by 284
“…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).”
Preventing extreme polarization of political attitudes
Axelrod, R., Daymude, J. J., & Forrest, S. (2021) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.2102139118 · Cited by 154
“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].”
BackgroundModeling the emergence of affective polarization in the social media society
Törnberg, P., Andersson, C., Lindgren, K., & Banisch, S. (2021) · PLOS ONE · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0258259 · Cited by 118
“As research using survey data has shown, this means that opinions are not so much diverging as they are becoming clustered and interlinked [77].”
MethodEvaluating Belief System Networks as a Theory of Political Belief System Dynamics
Brandt, M. J., & Sleegers, W. W. A. (2021) · Personality and Social Psychology Review · doi:10.1177/1088868321993751 · Cited by 93
“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).”
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Metadata
- Authors
- DellaPosta, D.
- Affiliations
- Pennsylvania State University (US)
- Corresponding author
- DellaPosta, Daniel
- ORCID
- DellaPosta, Daniel
- Venue
- American Sociological Review
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2020-06
- Volume
- 85
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 507-536
- ISSN
- 0003-1224 (ISSN-L)
- 1939-8271
- OpenAlex
- W3034108861
- Semantic Scholar
- 866357ade0b940c5aa010a94bd27d7287d4132a0
- Cited by
- 219
- References
- 113
- Citations by year
- 2026: 31 · 2025: 53 · 2024: 46 · 2023: 27 · 2022: 32 · 2021: 20 · 2020: 9
- FWCI
- 76.65
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- American Sociological Review (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Electoral Systems and Political Participation
- Physical Sciences › Physics and Astronomy › Statistical and Nonlinear Physics › Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence
- Social Sciences › Communication › Social Media and Politics
- Keywords
- Bayesian networks, political ideology, partisanship, pluralism, opinion change, General Social Survey
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