Unanimity, Coexistence and Rigidity: Three Sides of Polarization

TL;DR

This paper uses the Galam model to analyze how different social factors like contrarians and stubborn agents influence political polarization, revealing conditions for coexistence, rigidity, and the emergence of hate in divided communities.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of polarization dynamics considering contrarians and stubborn agents within a five-dimensional opinion model.

Findings

Polarization can result from group prejudices or the presence of contrarians and stubborn agents.

Contrarians lead to fluid polarization with high opinion shifts and coexistence.

Stubborn agents cause frozen polarization with low opinion shifts, fostering hate.

Abstract

Political polarization is perceived as a threat to democracies. Using the Galam model of opinion dynamics deployed in a five-dimensional parameter space, I show that polarization is the byproduct of an essential hallmark of a vibrant democratic society, namely the open and informal discussions among agents. Indeed, within a homogeneous social community with floaters, the dynamics leads gradually toward unanimity (zero entropy). Polarization can eventually appear as the juxtaposition of non-mixing social groups sharing different prejudices about the issue at stake. On the other hand, the inclusion of contrarian agents produces a polarization within a community that mixes when their proportion $x$ is beyond a critical value $x_c=\frac{1}{6}\approx 0.167$ for discussing groups of size 3 and 4. Similarly, the presence of stubborn agents produces also a polarization of a community that mixes when the proportion of stubborns is greater than some critical value. For equal proportions of stubborns $a$ along each opinion, $a_c=\frac{2}{9}\approx 0.22$ for group size 4 against $a_c=\frac{1}{4}= 0.25$ for group size 3. However, the evaluation of the proportion of individual opinion shifts at the attractor $\frac{1}{2}$ indicates that the polarization produced by contrarians is fluid with a good deal of agents who keep shifting between the two opposed blocks (high entropy). That favors a coexistence of opposite opinions in a divided community. In contrast, the polarization created by stubborn agents is found to be frozen with very few individuals shifting opinion between the two opinions (low entropy). That yields a basis for the emergence of hate between the frozen opposed blocks.