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Rising political polarization in recent decades has hampered and gridlocked policymaking, as well as weakened trust in democratic institutions. These developments have been linked to the idea that new media technology fosters extreme views and political conflict by facilitating self-segregation into "echo chambers" where opinions are isolated and reinforced. This opinion-centered picture has recently been challenged by an emerging political science literature on "affective polarization", which suggests that current polarization is better understood as driven by partisanship emerging as a strong social identity. Through this lens, politics has become a question of competing social groups rather than differences in policy position. Contrary to the opinion-centered view, this identity-centered perspective has not been subject to dynamical formal modeling, which generally permits hypotheses about micro-level explanations for macro-level phenomena to be systematically tested and explored. We here propose a formal model that links new information technology to affective polarization via social psychological mechanisms of social identity. Our results suggest that new information technology catalyzes affective polarization by lowering search and interaction costs, which shifts the balance between centrifugal and centripetal forces of social identity. We find that the macro-dynamics of social identity is characterized by two stable regimes on the societal level: one fluid regime , in which identities are weak and social connections heterogeneous, and one solid regime in which identities are strong and groups homogeneous. We also find evidence of hysteresis, meaning that a transition into a fragmented state is not readily reversed by again increasing those costs. This suggests that, due to systemic feedback effects, if polarization passes certain tipping points, we may experience run-away political polarization that is highly difficult to reverse.

The article describes the tool, which was formed and tested to assess politicians' emotional attitude to predict the impact of affective polarization on the nature of political confrontations. Plutchek's theoretical scheme of emotions has been operationalized, the tool for assessing emotional perception has been proposed, and its use for measuring the President's emotional perception has been tested. Eight basic attitudes that can be used as the foundation for behavioural matrices, representing different types of links between emotional evaluations and behavioural attitudes, have been modelled. The tool was tested during the survey with the participation of 1420 respondents. There have been identified two latent factors, which demonstrate the internal connection of eight pairs of bipolar emotions concerning the figure of the President. The first factor covers the emotions of defeat, the second is – emotions of victory. As far as the emotional attitude to the President is concerned, the presence of an emotional split between those who voted for him and those who were against him has been confirmed. It was found out that the structure of the emotional perception of the President by the winners is mobile and combines both positive and negative emotions. At the same time, the structure of the emotional attitude of the losers is monochrome and is mainly represented by negative emotions. Comparison of emotional profiles of representatives of polar groups revealed that the behavioural model of the defeated is formed by mixing two fundamental attitudes, those of the Distressed and the Rejected. The behavioural model of the winners is formed on the ground of the essential attitude, that of the Stakeholders. The emotional profile of those who did not vote for any of the candidates is generally closer to the profile of the winners. Significant differences in the emotional perception of the President between those who voted for and against him have been defined. There have also been fixed the peculiarities of emotional perception of the figure of the President, depending on the level of education and financial status of the respondents.

Some scholars have argued that the rise of digital media and a "high-choice media environment" have facilitated selective exposure and led to opinion polarization among the public. Others, in contrast, argued that digital media facilitate incidental exposure to news, connections with weak ties, and the building of heterogeneous networks. This article contends that the polarizing influence of digital media is not always materialized. Rather, the immediate political context matters, and polarization effects of digital media are particularly likely to arise in times of heightened political conflicts. This article analyzes survey data derived before and during the recent Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. The results show that political communication via social media was significantly related to extremity of political attitudes only during, but not before, the Umbrella Movement. The polarization influence is applicable to both people with and without a clear political orientation. Interpersonal discussion and news exposure also had polarizing effects on public opinion during the Umbrella Movement, suggesting that polarization effect is not unique to social media when the political context itself is polarizing.