This study looked at nine countries and found that polarisation had decreased in five. The US was an outlier, having seen the largest increase in polarisation. That may suggest that American polarisation is due to US-specific factors, rather than universal technological trends.
Here are some studies suggesting the prevalence of technology-driven echo chambers and filter bubbles may be exaggerated.
Please note that this study does not measure “polarization”—but instead “polarization between the top two parties”! See: > “We analyze the sensitivity of our findings to restricting attention to the top two parties in each country and focusing on periods in which this pair of parties is stable”
This does not work for any country with proportional electoral systems. I can speak to the German case, since I live there:
The two big parties are CDU/CSU (christian democrat / conservative) and SPD (social democrat). Both parties have become more similar to each other over the decades, and SPD in particular has bled voters like crazy for it. Here you can see current and historical polling data: CDU/CSU in black, SPD in red.
The most notable events here may be the “Energiewende” and the response to the mass migration in context of the Syrian civil war 2015 for the CDU/CSU, and the “Agenda 2010″ and the continual “great coalition” as the junior partner with the conservatives with the SPD.
This has opened up space to the right of the conservatives (the AfD has taken this space), and to the left of the SPD (taken up in parts by the far left party PDS / DIE LINKE and the green party BÜNDNIS 90 / DIE GRÜNEN). The SPD is now arguably not in the top two anymore, the greens seem to have taken that spot, possibly for good.
So, indeed, the polarization between CDU/CSU and SPD may have gone down, but this does not generalize. Germany has also become more polarized.
Figure 2 looks at the top two parties, but the legend to Figure 1 doesn’t say it’s restricted to the top two parties. And Figure 1 also shows decreasing polarisation in Germany. However, I haven’t looked into this research in depth.
Interesting that one of the two main hypotheses advanced in that paper is that media is influencing public opinion, but the media is not the internet, but TV!
The rise of 24-hour partisan cable news provides another potential explanation. Partisan cable networks emerged during the period we study and arguably played a much larger role in the US than elsewhere, though this may be in part a consequence rather than a cause of growing affective polarization.9 Older demographic groups also consume more partisan cable news and have polarized more quickly than younger demographic groups in the US (Boxell et al. 2017; Martin and Yurukoglu 2017). Interestingly, the five countries with a negative linear slope for affective polarization all devote more public funds per capita to public service broadcast media than three of the countries with a positive slope (Benson and Powers 2011, Table 1; see also Benson et al. 2017). A role for partisan cable news is also consistent with visual evidence (see Figure 1) of an acceleration of the growth in affective polarization in the US following the mid-1990s, which saw the launch of Fox News and MSNBC.
(The other hypothesis is “party sorting”, wherein people move to parties that align more in ideology and social identity.)
Perhaps campaigning for more money to PBS or somehow countering Fox and MSNBC could be really important for US-democracy.
Also, if TV has been so influential, it also suggests that even if online media isn’t yet influential on the population-scale, it may be influential for smaller groups of people, and that it will be extremely influential in the future.
Some argue, however, that partisan TV and radio was helped by the abolition of the FCC fairness doctrine in 1987. That amounts to saying that polarisation was driven at least partly by legal changes rather than by technological innovations.
Obviously media influences public opinion. But the question is whether specific media technologies (e.g. social media vs TV vs radio vs newspapers) cause more or less polarisation, fake news, partisanship, filter bubbles, and so on. That’s a difficult empirical question, since all those things can no doubt be mediated to some degree through each of these media technologies.
This study looked at nine countries and found that polarisation had decreased in five. The US was an outlier, having seen the largest increase in polarisation. That may suggest that American polarisation is due to US-specific factors, rather than universal technological trends.
Here are some studies suggesting the prevalence of technology-driven echo chambers and filter bubbles may be exaggerated.
Please note that this study does not measure “polarization”—but instead “polarization between the top two parties”! See:
> “We analyze the sensitivity of our findings to restricting attention to the top two parties in each country and focusing on periods in which this pair of parties is stable”
This does not work for any country with proportional electoral systems. I can speak to the German case, since I live there:
The two big parties are CDU/CSU (christian democrat / conservative) and SPD (social democrat). Both parties have become more similar to each other over the decades, and SPD in particular has bled voters like crazy for it. Here you can see current and historical polling data: CDU/CSU in black, SPD in red.
The most notable events here may be the “Energiewende” and the response to the mass migration in context of the Syrian civil war 2015 for the CDU/CSU, and the “Agenda 2010″ and the continual “great coalition” as the junior partner with the conservatives with the SPD.
This has opened up space to the right of the conservatives (the AfD has taken this space), and to the left of the SPD (taken up in parts by the far left party PDS / DIE LINKE and the green party BÜNDNIS 90 / DIE GRÜNEN). The SPD is now arguably not in the top two anymore, the greens seem to have taken that spot, possibly for good.
So, indeed, the polarization between CDU/CSU and SPD may have gone down, but this does not generalize. Germany has also become more polarized.
Figure 2 looks at the top two parties, but the legend to Figure 1 doesn’t say it’s restricted to the top two parties. And Figure 1 also shows decreasing polarisation in Germany. However, I haven’t looked into this research in depth.
Thanks! This is good news; will go look at those studies...
Interesting that one of the two main hypotheses advanced in that paper is that media is influencing public opinion, but the media is not the internet, but TV!
(The other hypothesis is “party sorting”, wherein people move to parties that align more in ideology and social identity.)
Perhaps campaigning for more money to PBS or somehow countering Fox and MSNBC could be really important for US-democracy.
Also, if TV has been so influential, it also suggests that even if online media isn’t yet influential on the population-scale, it may be influential for smaller groups of people, and that it will be extremely influential in the future.
Some argue, however, that partisan TV and radio was helped by the abolition of the FCC fairness doctrine in 1987. That amounts to saying that polarisation was driven at least partly by legal changes rather than by technological innovations.
Obviously media influences public opinion. But the question is whether specific media technologies (e.g. social media vs TV vs radio vs newspapers) cause more or less polarisation, fake news, partisanship, filter bubbles, and so on. That’s a difficult empirical question, since all those things can no doubt be mediated to some degree through each of these media technologies.