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This extension of Christian Davenport's virtual Presidential address to the Peace Science Society International attempts to: (1) identify as well as confront some of the issues that divide the Peace Science community and (2) provide some ideas/actions about what can be done to fix them. The article is as much a reflection on where we have been as it is a call to where we must go.

This article examines if the emergence of more partisan media has contributed to political polarization and led Americans to support more partisan policies and candidates. Congress and some newer media outlets have added more partisan messages to a continuing supply of mostly centrist news. Although political attitudes of most Americans have remained fairly moderate, evidence points to some polarization among the politically involved. Proliferation of media choices lowered the share of less interested, less partisan voters and thereby made elections more partisan. But evidence for a causal link between more partisan messages and changing attitudes or behaviors is mixed at best. Measurement problems hold back research on partisan selective exposure and its consequences. Ideologically one-sided news exposure may be largely confined to a small, but highly involved and influential, segment of the population. There is no firm evidence that partisan media are making ordinary Americans more partisan. Adapted from the source document.

Research has documented increasing partisan division and extremist positions that are more pronounced among political elites than among voters. Attention has now begun to focus on how polarization might be attenuated. We use a general model of opinion change to see if the self-reinforcing dynamics of influence and homophily may be characterized by tipping points that make reversibility problematic. The model applies to a legislative body or other small, densely connected organization, but does not assume country-specific institutional arrangements that would obscure the identification of fundamental regularities in the phase transitions. Agents in the model have initially random locations in a multidimensional issue space consisting of membership in one of two equal-sized parties and positions on 10 issues. Agents then update their issue positions by moving closer to nearby neighbors and farther from those with whom they disagree, depending on the agents' tolerance of disagreement and strength of party identification compared to their ideological commitment to the issues. We conducted computational experiments in which we manipulated agents' tolerance for disagreement and strength of party identification. Importantly, we also introduced exogenous shocks corresponding to events that create a shared interest against a common threat (e.g., a global pandemic). Phase diagrams of political polarization reveal difficult-to-predict transitions that can be irreversible due to asymmetric hysteresis trajectories. We conclude that future empirical research needs to pay much closer attention to the identification of tipping points and the effectiveness of possible countermeasures.

Front Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Information -- Table of Contents -- Introduction -- Part I: Severe Polarization and Democratic Breakdown -- The Islamist-Secularist Divide and Turkey's Descent into Severe Polarization -- Persistent Ethnic Polarization in Kenya -- Part II: Severe Polarization and Democratic Stress -- The Long Path of Polarization in the United States -- Hindu Nationalism and Political Polarization in India -- Of "Patriots" and Citizens: Asymmetric Populist Polarization in Poland -- Part III: Elite Polarization in Relatively Homogenous Societies -- Colombia's Polarizing Peace Efforts -- Winner Takes All: Elite Power Struggles and Polarization in Bangladesh -- Part IV: Staying Clear? -- Polarization and Democratic Decline in Indonesia -- Brazil: When Political Oligarchies Limit Polarization but Fuel Populism -- Part V: Conclusion -- Comparative Experiences and Insights -- Acknowledgments -- Contributors -- Index -- Back Cover.

Recent decades have seen a rise in polarization in many countries, but the causes and mechanisms behind this rise are still heavily debated. Even though polarization is reliably connected to extreme affect and elevated social identity salience, these connections have been treated as ephemeral by most researchers. In this thesis, we identify affect and social identity as central drivers of political polarization. Our methodological approach is both theory-driven and data-driven. By combining theories from psychology and political science, we develop a theoretical perspective that links affect to cognitive processes and social identity, and, via interactions, relations and communication, to the emergence of polarization on the collective level. To test this theoretical framework, we apply state-of-the-art statistical, affect detection and natural language processing methods to large-scale datasets from various online media, political surveys, as well as a unique dataset covering 96 years of political interactions in the Swiss parliament. We also contribute to political science methodology by developing theoretically grounded measures of relational polarization. Our analyses reveal how affect influences cognitive processes in ways that, depending on the specific affective state, either lead to thorough evaluation and complex processing of political arguments, or to reliance on simple cognitive heuristics and group membership cues. In online discussion, the effect of affect is reinforced by affect sharing and the concomitant emergence of collective affect. In this way, online discussions can tilt into states dominated by extreme affective expressions, and characterized by repetitive and superficial argumentation, which in turn promotes the emergence of polarization. We also explore how properties of online media, such as character constraints, facilitate the sharing of affect, and thus might contribute to polarization. On the political macro-level, we can show how affect interacts with characteristics of the political situation to influence long-term trends in polarization. When power is monopolized and public resources are scarce, both extreme affect and polarization increase. Power sharing and economic prosperity, in contrast, lead to periods of political harmony. Finally, we demonstrate how, by implementing psychologically founded micro-mechanisms, the alignment and polarization of ideological positions can be reproduced with an agent based model. Again, affect is identified as the central driver of ideological alignment and polarization. In conclusion, through this thesis we contribute to polarization research in three ways: i) by advancing the conceptual understanding of polarization by merging theoretical perspectives from psychology and political science, ii) by expanding the methodological tool set of these disciplines, and iii) by compiling several unique large-scale datasets, which will be made available to the research community.

Draws on data from the General Household Survey (GHS) on household incomes in GB & London between 1979 & 1993 to examine the existence of social polarization & inequality. It is noted that polarization in America is usually defined as shrinkage of the middle classes & growth at both the top & bottom of the occupational & earnings spectrum. Conversely, polarization in GB emphasizes a growing divide between a "comfortable middle mass of households with two or more earners & a residualized group with no earners." Analysis of GHS data at the household income level showed little evidence for the American model of polarization in GB but revealed a significant increase in income inequality between 1979-1993 in GB as a whole, & even more so in London, with most of the transfer occurring from the middle to the top end of the household income distribution. Dual income professional/managerial households were shown to be the most affluent. The negative effect of gender & ethnicity on differences in the median household income is discussed. 19 Tables. J. Lindroth

America is divided by two clashing views about individual responsibility. Liberals see many people as not completely responsible for the situation they are in, their opportunities limited by their class, race, and sex. Distribution of outcomes is therefore seen as unjust, and the government has to help offset the limits people face. In contrast, conservatives believe individuals can and must live their lives with a presumption of personal responsibility for what happens. Government assistance is not seen as valuable, but as creating dependency and ultimately crippling to those who receive it

The purpose of this research was to examine the causes and consequences that meta-perceptions of polarization in the United States entails. The survey used in this study assessed respondents demographic and political information prior to questions regarding polarization. This study found that the polarization in the United States results from a multitude of variables, including: the intrusion of partisan cues into everyday life, social sorting, polarization's implicit effect, and differences in moral concern. Moreover, polarization encompasses and variety of ramifications that include disease, amplified interparty animosity, biased policy evaluation, reduced governmental efficiency, intraparty polarization, tribalism, and the quest to achieve political victory rather than achieving the "greater good." In further discussion, it was determined that polarization poses two main outcomes for the United States: a perpetual cycle in which polarization continues to increase over time, or a future in which polarization has already reached its apex and, thus, will deescalate over time. In light of these findings, it is prudent for Americans to refrain from impulsivity to preclude the onset of polarization and its accompanying repercussions.

Chapter 1. Introduction -- Chapter 2. Sociological Foundations of Computational Social Science -- Chapter 3. Methodological contributions of computational social science to sociology -- Chapter 4. Computational Social Science: A Complex Contagion -- Chapter 5. Model of meaning -- Chapter 6. Sociological Meaning of Contagion -- Chapter 7. Polarization of Opinion -- Chapter 8. Coda.