Great work, thanks for writing this up! I agree that excessive polarisation is an important issue and warrants more EA attention. In particular, polarisation is an important risk factor for s-risks.
Political polarization, as measured by political scientists, has clearly gone up in the last 20 years.
If there’s more I’m missing, feel free to provide links in the comment section.
Olaf van der Veen has written a thesis on this, analysing four possible interventions to reduce polarisation: (1) switching from FPTP to proportional representation, (2) making voting compulsory, (3) increasing the presence of public service broadcasting, and (4) creating deliberative citizen’s assemblies. Olaf’s takeaway (as far as I understand it) is that those interventions seem compelling and fairly tractable but the evidence of possible impacts is often not very strong.
increasing the presence of public service broadcasting
I don’t know how well that would work in the US—it seems that existing public service broadcasters (PBS and NPR) are perceived as biased by American conservatives.
A related idea I’ve seen is media companies which sell cancellation insurance (archive). The idea being that this is a business model which incentivizes obtaining the trust and respect of as many people as possible, as opposed to inspiring a smaller number of true believers to share/subscribe. One advantage of this idea is it doesn’t require any laws to get passed. (As polarization gets worse, I expect passing depolarization laws gets harder and harder.)
Great work, thanks for writing this up! I agree that excessive polarisation is an important issue and warrants more EA attention. In particular, polarisation is an important risk factor for s-risks.
It is worth noting that this is a US-centric perspective and the broader picture is more mixed, with polarisation increasing in some countries and decreasing in others.
Olaf van der Veen has written a thesis on this, analysing four possible interventions to reduce polarisation: (1) switching from FPTP to proportional representation, (2) making voting compulsory, (3) increasing the presence of public service broadcasting, and (4) creating deliberative citizen’s assemblies. Olaf’s takeaway (as far as I understand it) is that those interventions seem compelling and fairly tractable but the evidence of possible impacts is often not very strong.
I myself have also written about electoral reform as a possible way to reduce polarisation, and malevolent individuals in power also seem closely related to increased polarisation.
I don’t know how well that would work in the US—it seems that existing public service broadcasters (PBS and NPR) are perceived as biased by American conservatives.
A related idea I’ve seen is media companies which sell cancellation insurance (archive). The idea being that this is a business model which incentivizes obtaining the trust and respect of as many people as possible, as opposed to inspiring a smaller number of true believers to share/subscribe. One advantage of this idea is it doesn’t require any laws to get passed. (As polarization gets worse, I expect passing depolarization laws gets harder and harder.)
Here’s another idea for the list: https://twitter.com/JohnArnoldFndtn/status/1266701479404060678