ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Phys.
Sec. Social Physics
An Affinity Based Opinion Dynamics Model for the Evolving Pattern of Political Polarization
Provisionally accepted
- 1Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
- 2Beijing Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Applications, Beijing, China
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Political polarization has been a subject that has attracted many studies in recent years. We have developed an opinion dynamics model with affective homophily effect and national social norm effect to describe this phenomenon. The time evolution of the polarization between the two parties and the spread of opinions within each party are affected by three factors: the repulsive effect between the two parties, the attractive and repulsive effects between the members in each party, and the national social norm effect that pulls the opinions of all members towards a common norm. The model is internally consistent and is applied to the simulation of the symmetric patterns of polarization and spread of the opinion distributions in the U.S. Congress and the results align well with 154 years of recorded data. The time evolution of the strength of the national social norm effect is obtained and is consistent with the important historical events occurred during the past one and half century.
Keywords: strength of social norm effect, polarization, spread, opinion dynamics, Ideology, affective homophily, U.S. Congress
Received: 16 Sep 2025; Accepted: 21 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhang, Hu and Zhang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Xiaoming John Zhang, zhangxiaoming@bimsa.cn
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