Raising the Spectrum of Polarization: Generating Issue Alignment with a Weighted Balance Opinion Dynamics Model

Political polarization is often understood in terms of extreme issue positions. But polarization can only emerge if issue positions are aligned into a single ideological spectrum, ranging from left/ liberal to right/ conservative. It is unclear how a high-dimensional space of policy issues can organize itself into a single ideological spectrum and give rise to polarization. We explain this phenomenon using Weighted Balance Theory (WBT), which describes the interaction of issue positions and interpersonal affect. By implementing WBT into an agent-based opinion dynamics model, we generate a single ideological spectrum from an arbitrarily high dimensional issue space. Furthermore, we show that WBT outperforms other models in predicting respondents’ attitudes in 44 years worth of empirical data from the ANES survey. A calibrated version of our model can reproduce properties of empirically observed opinion distributions.