Polarisation in increasingly connected societies

Abstract

Explanations of polarization often rely on one of the three mechanisms: homophily, bounded confidence, and community-based interactions. Models based on these mechanisms consider the lack of interactions as the main cause of polarization. Given the increasing connectivity in modern society, this explanation of polarization may be insufficient. We aim to show that in involvement-based models, society becomes more polarized as its connectedness increases. To this end, we propose a minimal voter-type model (called I-voter) that incorporates involvement as a key mechanism in opinion formation and study its dependence on network connectivity. We describe the steady-state behaviour of the model analytically, at the mean-field and the moment-hierarchy levels and stress the generality of our findings by considering various extensions and different network topologies.