So I buy that a two-party system would increase *affective* polarization, especially negative polarization - people start thinking of the parties as opposing teams and have sports-like tribal reactions. But why wouldn't it *decrease* *policy* polarization? Naively, you'd expect the party platforms to be as close as possible, so that they might capture as much of the electoral middle as possible. They'd try to differ just enough so that voters could distinguish them, and not more than that. Why doesn't this happen? Is the combination (high affective polarization, low policy polarization) inherently unstable?
Thanks for the response! Do you think there's evidence that candidates/parties care about being on the right side of history or that voters judge them on that? My sense is that in the short term which side of history is seen as "right" is itself driven by party identity (e.g. Iraq), and I'm somewhat skeptical about parties worrying about anything longer-term than that (e.g. because in the long term you might no longer think of it as the same party in any meaningful sense; people agree that Lincoln was on the right side of history but that doesn't harm present-day Democrats since the parties have since swapped).
Thanks, this is super helpful! I guess I'm still a little uncertain about the overall effect of this sort of process on polarization: in your telling, it looks like Republicans first increased polarization by disrupting the consensus view, but then when Democrats shifted closer to the new Republican position, polarization decreased again. I guess in the long term I would expect this process to keep polarization relatively low and roughly constant.
Well, the question was "what happened in 2000-2005" and there was one huge event (and the follow-up) right around that time...seems likely that it was a catalyst, at minimum.
I think it was before 9/11 if that is what you are referring to... I think it started during the spectacle of Newt vs Clinton (impeachment and everything else). If Americans wanted to discuss it, you were forced to pick a side (should we impeach or not, is he guilty or not, do we (or why) care or not, is this an embarrassment for the USA and if so who is to blame). I think CNN/cable news coverage of this event, the internet and the sensational atmosphere was a catalyst, maybe THE catalyst. Another way to say this too is that once Congress became polarized, the general population either had to join it or say it was unacceptable.
Personally I have viewed the largest cause of increasing American political polarization as a direct result of the algorithmic changes that our society has undergone, primarily (but not only!) with respect to the Internet.
The short version of this is that the Internet proliferates content that is emotionally outraging at significantly higher virality factors than non-polarizing content. You can pick who you want to blame for this, but the truth is that it is not a single person, party, website, or company, but rather the system as a whole and the incentives that construct it.
Facebook profits off of polarization in the same way Twitter, Youtube, CNN, Fox, and, well, everyone else does. Even if these entities decide "Profit is nice, but we would rather have less polarization", they will *still* have a difficult time reducing it, because they are going against the incentive structures of the entire system: content that outrages is still significantly more viral and memetic, and will thus spread more rapidly and become more commonplace, in the exact same was covid and its various strains will continue to spread even as you attempt half-baked countermeasures.
Similar to the author of this novel, however, it's difficult to come up with a solution that is actually feasible to implement. I'm hoping that society, at many levels, will start to collectively realize what is occurring and (very slowly, but eventually) take steps to remedy this with improved algorithms that do a better job at suggesting constructive rather than destructive content.
And of course I should add, that what I have mentioned here is still only one factor. There's many factors at play given how complex a society of our size is, but I predominantly think this is currently the leading factor, and that it has more causal factor than many other contributing factors.
What did you think of the section on how other countries with the same growth in Internet and social media have become less polarized over the same period?
This is a good point to mention, and perhaps my response won't go far enough to refute it fully, but the way I have thought about it is that America has been a leader with, well, everything with respect to the Internet. America is really good at capitalism, and this shows both in some great ways and in some terrible ways, and some of these include that all of the dominant Internet platforms (almost, excluding China) are from the US, are used the most in the US proportionally, and generate, by far, significantly more revenue in the US.
For one example, let's take a look at how much revenue a company like Facebook makes from a US user compared to users in other countries (I will admit this is a bit of a tangent, but it helps get the general idea across). From their last earnings report (pretty slides: https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2020/q3/FB-Q3-2020-Earnings-Presentation.pdf), Facebook's average revenue per user in the US+Canada is $40 per quarter. Yes, if you use FB and live in the US, your expected value is $160 per year to FB! For a comparison, it is $12 per quarter in Europe, $4 in Asia, and $2 in the rest of the world. So, although Facebook has 200M users in US+Canada and 2B users worldwide, a FB user in the US is worth 10-20 times more revenue for Facebook.
This alone is not enough to support my argument, but think of the differences in which countries support, what is essentially anarcho-capitailsm on the Internet: The US is definitely #1, and I'm not sure it's even a close competition. We have no data protection laws (almost at all, save for CA and a few niche laws elsewhere), our software developers make salaries several times that of other countries (and sometimes 10x more than third world countries) because our tech companies are amazingly efficient at generating revenue, it is extremely easy to start a company, we have corporations the size of which humanity has never seen, we have 10-100x more Internet startups than many countries of a similar population, and so on.
It is kind of hard to type longer posts in Substack's current comment system, so this might be a bit rambling, but my thoughts are basically that the US is good at constructing efficient systems that optimize for things more quickly than other countries, and this is both why we have e.g. more polarization, a higher GDP, more Internet startups, more inequality, larger megacorps, and much more. The hard part here is that systems don't always optimize for good things, and that is part of why the US can be such a mess in its own unique ways. But I would expect to see a correlation of the above factors that I mentioned in other countries, but doing a good study (let alone RCT) would definitely be hard.
"if you use FB and live in the US, your expected value is $160 per year to FB! For a comparison, it is $12 per quarter in Europe," That is some incredible statistics... Do you have any idea why it is that the US so successfully utilizes facebook's ad infrastructure, relative to Europe?
The shortest and most simple answer would be something like "People browsing social media in the US have more money that they are willing to spend on things", but I think one could do much more analysis than this depending on what angle they want to view it from.
The thing is the difference is over 13x, and the US isn't 13x richer, nor do they spend 13x more time on FB.. As a European who's lived in the US for 6 years my best guess is that the US is further ahead when it comes to connecting the digital shopping interface with an actual physical infrastructure. Like we don't have the physical infratstructure to go with our digital interface yet. But still, 13x is a lot... Seems like whoever manages to figure this out is about to make a lot of money.
Since FB's revenue is basically entirely from ads in this section, it likely means advertisers are willing to pay much more money to show US users ads, which is likely because US users are more likely to purchase their products for a lot of money.
But, you're right that it can still be a strikingly large difference between countries. Feel free to look through the rest of those slides and you'll find some other interesting graphs that might help you model it.
I think it's much more likely to be market size - I can run an advert on FB in the US that will get to 350m people. I have to run adverts in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Dutch, etc to reach a market of comparable size in the EU, and that means that the creative costs are far higher per ad impression, which means that the creatives get more of the revenue and FB gets less.
13x is absurd. Looking at consumption expenditure per capita, it looks like Americans spend roughly twice as much as the average European, with a lot of intra-EU variability.
in the US [total shot in the dark here] do we use Social Media more because we have so much more geography AND we're more likely to move; so we need the social media more than the average EU citizen to keep in touch with people? I did see your comment about US just being first adopters of social media though and that's probably more of a reason than large geography.
> because we have so much more geography AND we're more likely to move;
Is this true?
From what I can tell: a) Europe is bigger. b)I'm not sure who moves more American's or Europeans. Europeans move all over the place for university and work, and its quite easy to do so. Sometimes you can get a bus or plane ticket from one country to another for 5 or 10 euros. And often there will be a country where you will earn much more money within a 1000 km of where you grew up.
For a variety of reasons I don't think the relationship between income and Facebook spend value would be linear. IE: if one individual makes 10x more money then the other, its *not* particularly likely that they are 10x more valuable to FB.
Here's some random variables that might correlate with Facebook spend value that I brainstormed. Maybe they have some grain of truth within them:
* Linguistic diversity -> I get ads in german, because i live in Germany but my German level is not high enough to really understand the ads. The US is much less linguistically diverse. If you're an advertiser paying for an add in German and it lands on my screen, you're not going to have a high conversion rate.
* Cultural relationship to money, spending, banking, and credit - Germans do not take loans for example. My credit card in Germany doesn't really allow me to spend money I don't have. Back home in Canada when I turned 19 I was offered 15k in credit, for no reason. Banking laws are probably stricter in most of Europe. Consumer protection laws for banking probably restricts credit giving more.
* Data Privacy laws + GDPR. - Advertisers cannot track you as well because they have to ask your consent to store information.
* Average Wealth / income - Isn't income way lower in Europe? You could checkout this list, find the US and then check out Croatia and Poland for example https://www.worlddata.info/average-income.php
* Cultural Values -> Europeans are more likely to want time off rather than more money.
Europeans are more likely to have grown up in a communal society, ie the former soviet union, than US, maybe this has certain effects on behavior like perhaps valuing flashy status symbol purchases less than American's might..
* Smaller Flats - Europe is more densely populated, people live in smaller flats, there is less room for "stuff".
* Network pervasiveness of facebook. - How many of your friends are on facebook must affect your engagement level. Different populations have different percentages of facebook use i'm guessing. And I suppose your engagement level probably relates to your spend value for Facebook.
* availability of the internet
I admittedly just made these all up, and used my experience living in Germany, but I think some of these factors must affect the spend value.
Since I don't think I can edit comments, I will add that I don't think it's a uniquely American problem, and I don't intend the above argument as a refutation, but rather a modicum of supporting evidence that algorithmic/capitalistic incentives with an efficient Internet ecosystem/economy are a large factor at play here, and one that I think is often under-discussed. It's also likely that the 'base' causal factors involved are very complex, and so I might also be mistaking a downstream correlate as causal when more basic political analysis (e.g. in the book this post is about) may end up bearing more fruit for more-controllable causal factors.
"Facebook's average revenue per user in the US+Canada is $40 per quarter. Yes, if you use FB and live in the US, your expected value is $160 per year to FB! For a comparison, it is $12 per quarter in Europe, $4 in Asia, and $2 in the rest of the world. So, although Facebook has 200M users in US+Canada and 2B users worldwide, a FB user in the US is worth 10-20 times more revenue for Facebook."
I was intending the 10x comparison to be a generalization of the US vs. other countries, rather than the US vs. EU specifically (even so, 3x is still a big difference!)
Oh, it was $40 per quarter (US) vs $12 per quarter (EU). That makes more sense.
Also, I just got done watching a "legal systems very different from our own" lecture on youtube literally 5 minutes ago, and now I see a notification from David Friedman lol
I would recommend "Death by a Thousand Cuts", the documentary on Duterte and the opposition/free press in the Philippines. The protagonist/journalist hero asserts that the Phillipines is the most online country. Given the extreme crudeness and negative partisanship in contemporary Phillipine politics, I think this supports your argument or something similar.
@Nearcyan: I'm confused because you're quoting revenue numbers and talking about them like they're profit numbers. A US Facebook user's expected value to FB per year is $160 minus expected cost.
I don't know much about this, but how likely do we think it is that US Facebook users also cost FB more?
"It's kind of hard to type longer posts in Substack's current comment system, so this might be a bit rambling, but my thoughts are basically that the US is good at constructing efficient systems."
One somewhat correlating feature is USA & UK have First past the post electoral systems, so 2 party politics (or thereabouts). Most other W European nations have tortuous multi party coalitions.
Big it up for Approval Voting (or something similar).
Yes! I think that, if you have a system that naturally leads to 2 parties, then those 2 parties will start defining themselves as Eagles and Rattlers (like in the Robber's Cave experiment). I think one way to prevent this is if the parties have enough _internal_ drama to prevent the formation of a single ingroup identity, like with the Dixiecrats vs. Democrats.
I read the article and wasn't particularly convinced. The relevant part of the experiment here is that the two groups evolved some culture and deepened the differences when they became aware of each other, not that the experimenters orchestrated the following peace (which I'm sure is true).
(Also, the next article on that blog is a praise of Zimbardo's famous prison experiment, and not a word on the fact that it has rightly been called a fraud. I lost all respect for the author after that.)
"One somewhat correlating feature is USA & UK have First past the post electoral systems, so 2 party politics (or thereabouts)" That really isn't true for the UK. If you just look at England, you have the Conservatives and Labour, but there is also a third party – the Liberal Democrats – the Liberal Democrats have never been able to govern in their own right (although they are descended in part from the Liberal Party of the late 19th/early 20th centuries which did), but between 2010 and 2015 they were part of a coalition government along with the Conservatives. Move beyond England to the other constituent countries – Scotland is governed by the SNP; Northern Ireland has its own party system based on Unionist (primarily DUP, but also UUP and others) vs Nationalist (primarily Sinn Fein, but also SDLP and others) vs Neutral (Alliance). So the UK definitely does not have a hard two party system like the US does. It is better described as a soft two party system, in which at the national level there are two main parties, but third parties are represented in the national legislature and even sometimes can wield some genuine political power (through offering their support to one of the major parties in exchange for concessions.)
A hard two party system can't be blamed solely on first-past-the-post, because both the UK and Canada have first-past-the-post at a national level, but they have soft two party systems instead of hard ones. I think, in the US case, it is a combination of three factors: (1) first-past-the-post, (2) presidential rather than parliamentary system, (3) low level of geographically-aligned cultural diversity.
It also helps not having a president in the first place. In Canada the party leaders all debate together, as party leaders, not as candidates for government offices.
I think the groups that organize the debates usually have criteria like "anyone who is polling above 10% is in the debates". In the 1990s that meant that Ross Perot got to take part in some of the debates, but no one else ever gets close - usually because most of the public is clear enough on voting strategy in the layered first-past-the-post with electoral college, that there's very little chance of 10% of people preferring someone else.
I wrote this in my own post above but I think those countries are too small to make for a fair comparison. But also I'm not so sure it's the internet really either. I just think size is really important.
With the internet and social media technologies specifically, there is the added complication that by participating in that ecosystem different countries cease to be "independent" (or at least, uncorrelated) points of evidence on the charts.
On the internet, nobody knows you are a dog, but *you are a dog who speaks English who understands that meme*. Not only you are an English-speaking dog, but because of dominance of the US in the anglophone internet, it is assumed that American politics are relevant to you, which has a sort of cultural Medusa's eye effect of making the American politics relevant to you, because that is everything you read (pre-YouTube) or watch (post-YouTube) on the internet concerns the US in some way. If you read an essay (or listen to podcast) about philosophy, I'd say the chances are the writer (podcaster) has been educated in the US from books written by professors affiliated with American universities, even if they talk about, say, continental philosophy (seldom featuring quotes in original French or German).
And this is not about the internet only, it is connected wider changes in the discourse. I took some classes in economics in university. If there were textbooks in addition to lecturer's notes, they were in English and published by US printers; I took more classes in philosophy: same thing there with some Finnish books; in mathematics, the subject I majored in, again the books I read were in Finnish (often quite old books!) and in English (often quite modern books!), though also from UK-based publishers and Springer that is from Germany.
I forgot to add my main point, which is: nowadays, lots of cultural and political stuff (including topics and outward expressions of political polarization) appear to be downstream from the US politics.
One could hypothesize an exact form of mathematical equations for a dynamical system that models the flow of information with terms such as the population differential between the larger and smaller body of population and their relative internet adoption rates. Level of literacy in general and in English language could also have terms (how likely it is that a random member of the populace reads anything, and in significant amounts on the internet), but dwindling now when streaming content (both video and audio) are becoming more and more popular.
The local leftist youth organization definitely got the idea to remove Mannerheim's statue completely independently without any aping of the US protests. Was pleasantly surprised to have it get shot down.
It was surreal, like cargo cult politics where you have to transplant US issues to Europe even if they don't make any sense.
The interesting thing about the Anglophone Internet's unity is that a decent amount of political issues simply *don't* map. The entire black-white US race issue is meaningless to anyone outside the US. We have race issues of our own, of course, but they don't map to that because we never had imported slave races (we have incompletely-genocided natives, we have scary foreigners, but the US rarely talks about their natives anywhere we can see and the scary foreigners of the UK or Australia are for reasons of geography not the same scary foreigners of the US).
I suspect this sort of thing might actually protect non-US Anglospheric politics from any bad effects of the Internet. The Internet can't differentiate between different Anglospheric nations, so to whatever degree social media outputs Shiri's Scissor it will output a *US* scissor due to their dominance. But because the other Anglospheric nations have different incendiary issues, a decent amount of those Scissor statements will have poor effect over here.
Yeah, there's some conflicting evidence here that I'd love to reconcile.
...on the one hand:
1. "Cross-Country Trends in Affective Polarization" (cited by Klein's follow-up article). Finds that other countries don't have relationship between internet usage and polarization. https://www.nber.org/papers/w26669
2. "Greater Internet use is not associated with faster growth in political polarization among US demographic groups" (note: same authors as above). Finds polarization has increased the most among the demographic groups least likely to use internet/social media. https://www.pnas.org/content/114/40/10612
...on the other:
3. "The Hostile Audience: The Effect of Access to Broadband Internet on Partisan Affect". Finds access to broadband increases partisan hostility, consumption of partisan media, and decreases in vote splitting. Based on differing broadband availability brought about by variation in state right-of-way regulations. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26379489
Re #1, maybe the US is just different? (Nearcyan mentions this in a sibling comment.) And maybe #2 and #3 aren't actually in conflict, because older people are more polarizable both via cable news and also via the internet when they finally get broadband access?
Facebook launched in 2004 in English only among college students. Just like rock music travelled to the rest of the world with a ten year gap... So did social media. Look at the role Facebook played in Myanmar in 2016. We are only now seeing the social media effect in other countries.
Maybe. But in many counties just getting Internet access the stuck deals with mobile carriers to make Facebook traffic free somewhat recently. So you’d expect the effect to be delayed.
Those countries are hardly relevant. Look at the countries on the chart in the vox article, and provide some data on why "social media" as a cause makes sense for the US and not places with the exact same uptake at the exact same time.
It’s also worth pointing out - any change can have varying effects across multiple environments. A little more rain in an environment that’s adapted to it usually doesn’t cause flooding, that same amount in a semi-arid region could be catastrophic.
The assumption here is that all the listed “western democracies” are the same.
Smoking causes cancer, but not everyone who smokes gets cancer. Social media could cause polarization, but not every country with people using social media would become polarized.
Countries use social networks differently. E.g. Twitter is vastly more popular in the US than here in Europe, I think I remember that 20 percent of Americans use it, whereas I would be surprised if it were as high as 5% here. Also, there is no equivalent alternative, people just do not partake in the 240 characters nonsense as often.
I wish I knew which of those countries are or aren't two-party systems.
As an American, I largely understand what 'polarization' means with regards to a two-party, winner-take all system. I'm not sure I know what polarization looks like in a country with many parties and/or proportional representation. I'm not sure that the measures designed to capture polarization under one system would accurately capture how it manifests in a different system.
I think even in a two party system, there's a lot of things that "polarization" can mean. It could mean the parties becoming more ideologically coherent; it could mean the Overton window widening in both directions; it could mean alignment of political views with other aspects of identity; it could mean increasing dislike of the other party. I think all of these things have happened in the United States, but some of them much more than others (ideological coherence is way up; Overton window is only slightly wider). But at least some of these things make sense in a multi-party system, while others don't.
Two-party vs multi-party is a continuum (where the US happens to currently be at one extreme). The former Commonwealth countries have >80% of the seats won by the top two parties, and the other countries have less than that.
I think the measure is clever but clearly flawed, as the merging and splitting of parties has a large effect on it even if there is no change in affect.
As some others on this thread have pointed out, I don't think it makes sense to discuss social media and loss of geography as distinction phenomena: the former is the mechanism of the latter. And loss of geography should be understood as a catalyst in a reaction whose factors are red-tribe/blue-tribe cultural divisions that have existed for decades longer. In other words, social media doesn't *cause* polarization; it makes latent polarization manifest. Not all countries with rapid growth in social media use experience the same effect that we did because not all countries had the same degree of latent polarization present beforehand.
"Loss of geography" is a weird way to put it when contemporary polarization is a *very* geographic phenomenon - the Democrats are now an urban party and the Republicans are a rural party, with suburban areas split largely based on population density as well.
A very good point, and i don't think the other counties becoming less polarized are killing the argument, in fact it sort of goes along if you think of other countries as us states. Some states are tends to become quite uniformly blue or red, too...
as mentioned later, most other countries are small.... Especially if you consider online presence, there US is really huge, larger than it's population or even gdp: culturally it's still the only superpower (BTW, a big difference between Republicans and democrats : Hollywood. Democrats have the public face of America, the thing that imho makes we are not (yet?) in a multilateral world.
Almost all other countries are internet-small enough to not polarize, they even have a natural outgroup to rally against : the US... That and they are often much more uniform than the US which is an immigration country.
Other maybe big enough actors could be China (obviously no political polarisation with one party), india (i guess Muslim/hindu interfere), brasil (may be close)
Note : i'm not from the US, but from a (very small) Euro country
One possibility: People have a certain demand for politics as tribalism and entertainment, but America's is a hard act to follow.
In the US, major sports are basketball, gridiron football, and baseball. But the UK has seems to have settled on an equilibrium where sports fans are overwhelmingly focused on soccer (they call it football), with cricket and rugby as also-rans. Maybe on a global level, we've settled on more of a UK-style equilibrium, where American politics is the overwhelming entertainment focus.
In my limited experience, non-Americans are substantially more polarized about American politics than Americans are.
Perhaps it is because social media and the Internet in general is so US-centric? I live in Sweden, and if I open Facebook/Twitter/etc I will be fed lots of culture war and "outrage porn" targeted specifically against US republicans. It's a common observation that many young people here can name more US politicians than Swedish politicians; it's a depressing testament to the virulence of the american culture war. But I don't think that young people learning to despise Republicans necessarily increases polarization *in Sweden* -- I think many people instead have a reaction like "thank God our conservatives aren't as off the rails as those guys".
I find it strange that our political-entertainment complex has made American politicians well-known in Sweden. Do you see these youths discussing American policy ideas as a result of their exposure to these politicians?
Here in Finland a local leftist party's youth org demanded the removal of a war hero's statue. I am sure they came to this idea completely independently and had been thinking about it for years before suddenly suggesting it more widely in 2020.
Same thing here - lefties wanted to tear down a statue of one our greatest scientists of all time (Linneus) because he had the _temerity_ not to hold current progressive racial views, back in the 18th century. They also got it into their little heads that Swedish police was exactly the same thing as the U.S. kind.
Around the 2016 Election, there where a 10 year old kid in a Swedish school (where I worked temporarily) who went around telling all the adults to not vote for Trump, until I reminded him, we where in Sweden and could not vote for any US precedent candidate.
Similar thing during UK BLM protests, where people were apparently talking about "the Feds" as if they were relevant. The people lived more on Twitter than in Britain.
I don't trust that finding, because it may very well be an artifact of the democratic rules. For example, in The Netherlands, big parties have relatively little disproportional advantage over smaller parties. So we have two leftist parties that vote nearly identically, whose supporters surely are very positive about the other party. Simply by combining these two parties, you'd make the measured polarization go up, even though nobody's beliefs would have changed.
The reason why these two parties are so similar is actually caused by polarization. One of these parties used to be a big tent leftist party that served working class to upper middle class people. After the party adopting 'third way' politics (where the party leader literally said that he was happy to abandon their socialist ideology), the working class support has disappeared.
Maybe the US problem is simply the "two big parties and nothing else" system. How about they get rid of that, and all that "first-past-the-post" voting? All of a sudden, they'd get a whole lot of nice parties to choose from, and it'd make actual sense to vote for them: Communist, Socialist, Green, Liberal, Libertarian, Conservative, Right-wing populist, Neonazi...
With more pluralism of points of view, there'd be less vetoism and less hating of the other 50%.
The drawback of course being a fractured parliament with three-parties coalitions which break down all the time and don't get anything done either. Maybe the truth is somewhere in between.
I think advancing technology has caused polarization to go from local to national to international. Educated western liberals are coalescing around a single pole with Donald Trump and American Republicans as the outgroup.
Germany, Norway, and Denmark only look less polarized because their outgroup is outside of their national borders. E.g., they're only non-polarized by the same standard by which Massachusetts, New York, California, Utah, and North Dakota are not polarized.
"Internet, and fast travel made national news more of a thing, and people switched from local-politics-as-part-of-daily-life to national-politics-as-entertainment"
When politics becomes entertainment, boarders don't matter anymore. We (the rest of the world) follow the US politics for the same reason we watch US movies and TV series, i.e. becasue you have a bigger and "better" entertainment complex.
That's not the only reason Germany looks less polarized (can't comment on Denmark or Norway). The main reason for Germany was that the Social Democrats split in two, with the right half being almost constantly in coalition with the Conservatives, while becoming more and more irrelevant. If you include their former left wing in the measures of polarization, it would probably stay as strong as ever.
As a side comment, other countries listed are considerably smaller. I think it is easier for non-ideology based national media to hold public attention in a smaller market. Also, don't know about the others but UK, Sweden, and Norway all have publicly funded TV and other news media (BBC, SVT, and NRK, respectively), which are directed to be politically neutral, by law in Sweden and Norway, and I think in UK as well. It would be interesting to see an informed comment on the situation in Germany.
The government media in Sweden are generally only considered politically neutral by those on the political left. E.g. in a poll a couple of years ago, 94% of Greens (left wing) and 28% of Sweden Democrats (right wing) expressed confidence in SVT. Private media in Sweden is also have clear political affiliations, with a crop of right-wing outlets gaining prominence since the rise of the WWW.
That is somewhat interesting, but SD is a kind of anti-establishment party, from which you would expect distrust of an establishment organization like SVT. Of course Sweden's whole political landscape is shifted relative to US, so from this perspective they are "the" right wing, but do you know what the numbers were for KD and M?
Social media does not affect small countries the same way. In Sweden we barely have our own national conversation, but instead just get flooded with memes (in both meanings of the word) from the larger English speaking world.
We get seeped into picking sides between tribe Republican or tribe Democrat. But these tribes don't split Sweden's population 50/50, and therefore don't form a stable basis for national politics. It's kind of weird rely.
Other countries are a lot more ideologically uniform than US, so there's less existing variation for any feedback loops to work on. There are negligible numbers of Christian fundamentalists in Western Europe, for example. If one looks at the percentage of creationists as a bad proxy, it's something like 40% in US and 5-10% in various European countries. Australia and NZ seem to be intermediate on this measurement.
Scott beat me to it, but it's really hard to imagine that this is a uniquely American/British phenomenon, and Germany meanwhile has the exact opposite trend, despite even better education/literacy/SES rates.
I thought that the far-right/Eurosceptics in Germany recently gained a lot of votes, with the result being that no other party was willing to talk to them. This doesn't fit well with the idea that polarisation there is falling. Maybe it's some kind of measurement artifact?
This is accurate imho, but it is important to note that the right-wing party AFD only has a share of 15%, so it's not a roughly 50-50 split as in the US. Nevertheless, many European countries current political climate seems to be less polarized across a left-right axis, but rather on a "populism-establishment" axis (or whatever you want to call it) where the established parties do not neatly map onto either side. So surveys which ask "how do you feel about the other parties" are going to miss that aspect.
If the US had a center-right and a far-right party, the split would probably be 50-25-25 or maybe 40-40-20. If Germany *didn't* have CDU, if the choices were limited to SPD or AfD or "throw your vote away", what do you think AfD's numbers would look like?
My guess would be around 70-30 or 80-20 for SPD, depending on whether or not migration plays a role in the election. AfD would however win in the states of the former GDR easily. SPD and CDU are nowadays really close in their policy positions (which in part made the rise of AfD possible in the first place), so most remaining CDU voters would switch to SPD instead of AfD. If however the two options were Green Party (recently the 2nd most popular party) vs AfD, a 65-35 split is conceivable, as many voters would probably be put off by perceived elitism and disinterest in the common man among the Green Party.
Yes, I would not like to reach some conclusion based uniquely on a few first-world countries. This may be anecdotical, but South America in general (Brazil definitely) seems quite polarized. Of course, many countries here were hard-hit by economical crisis, but even them.
A hypothesis that seems just as plausible to me: there is One True Internet Ideology that people get drawn to the more immersed they are in online culture; we've become polarised along the axis of how much we've picked up the One True Internet Ideology.
Seems to match up with demographic data, at least!
[An important part of this story is that the other countries in the data set started with cultures much closer to the One True Internet Ideology to begin with -- less religious, more socially liberal etc. I'd be curious as to what these graphs would look like for less wealthy nations]
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the Netflix documentary - The Social Dilemma. Pretty good piece if you haven't seen it. As has been noted, polarization pays, and it's not all that hard to game the various platforms to promote it. On a barely related, and lighter, side note. My wife (of 40 years) and I are polar opposites according to the Meyers Briggs test - My INTP vs her ESFJ. Our barely survived the first couple of years. Luckily, we had a counselor who suggested we both take the Meyers Briggs test. That was a turning point, because we then realized that a *lot* of our conflict was based on basic differences in how we processed information, etc., and not because we were being intentionally mean to each other. We eventually came to appreciate our differences and now joke that "together we make something close to a single, sane human being." I wonder what would happen if the social media platforms started gaming them to emphasize unity instead of polarization?
I think the "negative polarization" bit works the same mechanics as that old unhappy customer adage: "your average unhappy customer tells 10 people about their experience, whereas the happy customer tells only three" (or whatever the numbers were...)
Did Klein discuss the hypothesis that, well, maybe the US is just too big and too diverse to continue to exist as a single entity in the absence of a totalitarian regime?
No, and you would need some reason to think that 200 million people including lots of Irish and Italian wasn't this, but 300 million including lots of Mexicans and Asians was.
(didn't mean to delete my comment but... I'll try again)
This could be where technology and reduction in geographic segmentation comes in. And, to your point, perhaps the US is ahead of other countries (tech-wise), with polarization in other comparable large/diverse countries being inevitable. Semi-related -- another example of this may be the UK exiting the EU, as race-based politics featured heavily in that decision.
300 million would be fine, but only if people mostly formed their own groups and did their own thing separately from others. The federal government is too powerful and state power is too centralized. Think about the point you made:
"Kansas would have its Kansas Republicans and its Kansas Democrats, centered around the median Kansas voter, and they would both do about equally well in Kansas. "
Local parties can be responsive to the specific facts and needs in their town or state; national parties rely on broad and inflexible ideological platforms because they can't address anything specific. This is one of the main reasons the US was supposed to have states be the primary unit of governance (positions in state legislatures used to be considered more prestigious than positions in the federal Congress).
Counterpoint: the US used to be very polarized along state lines (think Civil War) and now...is not. If the US fought a civil war today, the two sides would be urban and rural; a person living in Brooklyn has much more in common with a person living in Austin than they do with a person living in a rural area in upstate New York. States are becoming less and less relevant as a marker of political identity.
That seems to suggest it's just on the slightly high end of average in state-line polarization. But in any case, it's very clear that to the extent there is polarization between states right now, it's only an accident of state lines happening to encompass urban areas or not. Any county or precinct level map makes clear that the state borders don't matter - population density does.
* People will trust and care for a friend of a friend, and even a friend of a friend of a friend, but no further
* Functional human relationships require energy to maintain or they will devolve into conflict
If you just take those two assumptions, you end up with an upper limit in terms of how many people can form a stable, functionally social network: it's 150^3, which is about 3 million people. Beyond that, you'll have pairs of people who aren't friends of friends of friends with each other, and will have some negative interactions which don't get maintained or repaired, and thus things break down further.
I think the general assumption should be that as systems get larger, scaling problems get more difficult to solve. There seems to be a general belief that "the ideal system for managing the world of human affairs is"
- independent of technology
- independent of the number of humans involved
- can exist in a permanently stable state
Based on my understanding of history and distributed computing, I'd guess that instability should be the norm, and we should instead be asking why those other countries aren't more polarized.
I think the second half of this makes a lot of sense - there's no reason to expect scale-independence or technology-independence or stability. But I'm not convinced by the first part - there seems to be an important phase transition somewhere between small town and medium town, where people switch from caring because you know someone to a more impersonal kindness to strangers. And empirically, I'm not aware of any suggestion that there's a qualitative change in city behavior anywhere in the single millions of population.
There's going to be huge overlap when counting your friend's friend's friends. So the real number is far, far lower than 3 M. Even if I had 3M of them, I would have no way of knowing if a given person knew my friend's friend. Hence the original Dunbar number can be meaningful but 3 M is not.
If someone is outside my 3M group, I don't see why that would cause conflict, just indifference. You're more likely to have conflict with your friend's friend.
(Edit: sorry 3rd attempt at posting, maybe cause of learning curve but this comment system seems somehow unstable)
Is there not also a network effect where economies of scale come in? Where only a country large as an empire has the resources to commit to govt technology going into inventing the internet, etc, which effectively reduces the burden of managing such a large number of people under single umbrellas? I mean, that’s effectively why we made the collective decision that more centralization could be in order, and though that forces our attention more to the (dys)functions of the central government, somehow every other metric of how well this civilization project is doing would indicate that maybe mass frustration is fine.
But I guess my question is: Are larger or smaller countries more historically stable? (hard to decide to measure that per capita or per constitution)
I guess I don’t know enough about distributed computing to know what you’re really talking about, but it terms of telephone networks or physiological systems, my prior intuition is that the more anastomoses or redundancies, the stabler.
But wasn't there a deliberate effort made to amalgamate all the Hypenated-Americans into being simply Americans back then? The whole point of the daily morning recital of the Pledge of Allegiance seems to me to be for that very reason: get 'em when they're young, din it into their heads so that it's automatic and unconscious that Seosamh and Joseph and José and Giuseppe are all "Joe" once they get to Ellis Island and all Americans under the one flag in the one nation, no matter where they/their parents/their grandparents came from. Like this scene, starting around 6:12, from the 1946 film "A Matter of Life and Death" where the former individuals who are representative of countries prejudiced against England are replaced by individuals from the same countries who are now all "American citizen(s)".
That changed. Now everyone is Hyphenated-American. I think the origional impulse was not in the service of polarisation, it was to discover and celebrate ancestral cultures, but it warped or curdled easily into Identity Politics and once politicians find out "there's votes in this", then that is how it grows.
>But wasn't there a deliberate effort made to amalgamate all the Hypenated-Americans into being simply Americans back then?
My understanding is that the opposite is true, and people treated you very differently if you were for example: Irish, Italian, Mexican, indiginous, etc.
The simple answer is that 200 million people including lots of Irish and Italians was too big and diverse to continue to exist as a single entity. So we had a civil war and 100 years of severe organized crime and gang violence.
But 100 years of intermarriage plus the greatest homogenizing force in history (WW2) created a temporary respite.
> And he suggests granting statehood to Puerto Rico and DC, because if we guarantee that the Democrats always win, then the Republicans will have to change their strategy
> But if you were to add 4 Democratic senators tomorrow, you'd have 51 Democrats, still two short of the 53 needed for a majority in a senate with 104 people.
Thank you for the edit. Even if the two new states were solid D, the Senate would still have a strong R lean. Implying that it means that Democrats "always win" is false beyond any measure of rhetorical merit. It made the post feel like you were so motivated to throw some shade on the blue tribe that you stopped caring about accuracy.
So I buy that a two-party system would increase *affective* polarization, especially negative polarization - people start thinking of the parties as opposing teams and have sports-like tribal reactions. But why wouldn't it *decrease* *policy* polarization? Naively, you'd expect the party platforms to be as close as possible, so that they might capture as much of the electoral middle as possible. They'd try to differ just enough so that voters could distinguish them, and not more than that. Why doesn't this happen? Is the combination (high affective polarization, low policy polarization) inherently unstable?
Thanks for the response! Do you think there's evidence that candidates/parties care about being on the right side of history or that voters judge them on that? My sense is that in the short term which side of history is seen as "right" is itself driven by party identity (e.g. Iraq), and I'm somewhat skeptical about parties worrying about anything longer-term than that (e.g. because in the long term you might no longer think of it as the same party in any meaningful sense; people agree that Lincoln was on the right side of history but that doesn't harm present-day Democrats since the parties have since swapped).
Thanks, this is super helpful! I guess I'm still a little uncertain about the overall effect of this sort of process on polarization: in your telling, it looks like Republicans first increased polarization by disrupting the consensus view, but then when Democrats shifted closer to the new Republican position, polarization decreased again. I guess in the long term I would expect this process to keep polarization relatively low and roughly constant.
Well, the question was "what happened in 2000-2005" and there was one huge event (and the follow-up) right around that time...seems likely that it was a catalyst, at minimum.
I think it was before 9/11 if that is what you are referring to... I think it started during the spectacle of Newt vs Clinton (impeachment and everything else). If Americans wanted to discuss it, you were forced to pick a side (should we impeach or not, is he guilty or not, do we (or why) care or not, is this an embarrassment for the USA and if so who is to blame). I think CNN/cable news coverage of this event, the internet and the sensational atmosphere was a catalyst, maybe THE catalyst. Another way to say this too is that once Congress became polarized, the general population either had to join it or say it was unacceptable.
Personally I have viewed the largest cause of increasing American political polarization as a direct result of the algorithmic changes that our society has undergone, primarily (but not only!) with respect to the Internet.
The short version of this is that the Internet proliferates content that is emotionally outraging at significantly higher virality factors than non-polarizing content. You can pick who you want to blame for this, but the truth is that it is not a single person, party, website, or company, but rather the system as a whole and the incentives that construct it.
Facebook profits off of polarization in the same way Twitter, Youtube, CNN, Fox, and, well, everyone else does. Even if these entities decide "Profit is nice, but we would rather have less polarization", they will *still* have a difficult time reducing it, because they are going against the incentive structures of the entire system: content that outrages is still significantly more viral and memetic, and will thus spread more rapidly and become more commonplace, in the exact same was covid and its various strains will continue to spread even as you attempt half-baked countermeasures.
Similar to the author of this novel, however, it's difficult to come up with a solution that is actually feasible to implement. I'm hoping that society, at many levels, will start to collectively realize what is occurring and (very slowly, but eventually) take steps to remedy this with improved algorithms that do a better job at suggesting constructive rather than destructive content.
And of course I should add, that what I have mentioned here is still only one factor. There's many factors at play given how complex a society of our size is, but I predominantly think this is currently the leading factor, and that it has more causal factor than many other contributing factors.
What did you think of the section on how other countries with the same growth in Internet and social media have become less polarized over the same period?
This is a good point to mention, and perhaps my response won't go far enough to refute it fully, but the way I have thought about it is that America has been a leader with, well, everything with respect to the Internet. America is really good at capitalism, and this shows both in some great ways and in some terrible ways, and some of these include that all of the dominant Internet platforms (almost, excluding China) are from the US, are used the most in the US proportionally, and generate, by far, significantly more revenue in the US.
For one example, let's take a look at how much revenue a company like Facebook makes from a US user compared to users in other countries (I will admit this is a bit of a tangent, but it helps get the general idea across). From their last earnings report (pretty slides: https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2020/q3/FB-Q3-2020-Earnings-Presentation.pdf), Facebook's average revenue per user in the US+Canada is $40 per quarter. Yes, if you use FB and live in the US, your expected value is $160 per year to FB! For a comparison, it is $12 per quarter in Europe, $4 in Asia, and $2 in the rest of the world. So, although Facebook has 200M users in US+Canada and 2B users worldwide, a FB user in the US is worth 10-20 times more revenue for Facebook.
This alone is not enough to support my argument, but think of the differences in which countries support, what is essentially anarcho-capitailsm on the Internet: The US is definitely #1, and I'm not sure it's even a close competition. We have no data protection laws (almost at all, save for CA and a few niche laws elsewhere), our software developers make salaries several times that of other countries (and sometimes 10x more than third world countries) because our tech companies are amazingly efficient at generating revenue, it is extremely easy to start a company, we have corporations the size of which humanity has never seen, we have 10-100x more Internet startups than many countries of a similar population, and so on.
It is kind of hard to type longer posts in Substack's current comment system, so this might be a bit rambling, but my thoughts are basically that the US is good at constructing efficient systems that optimize for things more quickly than other countries, and this is both why we have e.g. more polarization, a higher GDP, more Internet startups, more inequality, larger megacorps, and much more. The hard part here is that systems don't always optimize for good things, and that is part of why the US can be such a mess in its own unique ways. But I would expect to see a correlation of the above factors that I mentioned in other countries, but doing a good study (let alone RCT) would definitely be hard.
"if you use FB and live in the US, your expected value is $160 per year to FB! For a comparison, it is $12 per quarter in Europe," That is some incredible statistics... Do you have any idea why it is that the US so successfully utilizes facebook's ad infrastructure, relative to Europe?
The shortest and most simple answer would be something like "People browsing social media in the US have more money that they are willing to spend on things", but I think one could do much more analysis than this depending on what angle they want to view it from.
The thing is the difference is over 13x, and the US isn't 13x richer, nor do they spend 13x more time on FB.. As a European who's lived in the US for 6 years my best guess is that the US is further ahead when it comes to connecting the digital shopping interface with an actual physical infrastructure. Like we don't have the physical infratstructure to go with our digital interface yet. But still, 13x is a lot... Seems like whoever manages to figure this out is about to make a lot of money.
Since FB's revenue is basically entirely from ads in this section, it likely means advertisers are willing to pay much more money to show US users ads, which is likely because US users are more likely to purchase their products for a lot of money.
But, you're right that it can still be a strikingly large difference between countries. Feel free to look through the rest of those slides and you'll find some other interesting graphs that might help you model it.
The above comment uses different time units, year vs quarter. So the difference is 3.3 times, not 13.
Where do you get 13? Are you comparing the annual figure for the U.S. to the quarterly figure for Europe? The ratio is 3 1/3:1
I think it's much more likely to be market size - I can run an advert on FB in the US that will get to 350m people. I have to run adverts in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Dutch, etc to reach a market of comparable size in the EU, and that means that the creative costs are far higher per ad impression, which means that the creatives get more of the revenue and FB gets less.
13x is absurd. Looking at consumption expenditure per capita, it looks like Americans spend roughly twice as much as the average European, with a lot of intra-EU variability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household_final_consumption_expenditure_per_capita
in the US [total shot in the dark here] do we use Social Media more because we have so much more geography AND we're more likely to move; so we need the social media more than the average EU citizen to keep in touch with people? I did see your comment about US just being first adopters of social media though and that's probably more of a reason than large geography.
> because we have so much more geography AND we're more likely to move;
Is this true?
From what I can tell: a) Europe is bigger. b)I'm not sure who moves more American's or Europeans. Europeans move all over the place for university and work, and its quite easy to do so. Sometimes you can get a bus or plane ticket from one country to another for 5 or 10 euros. And often there will be a country where you will earn much more money within a 1000 km of where you grew up.
For a variety of reasons I don't think the relationship between income and Facebook spend value would be linear. IE: if one individual makes 10x more money then the other, its *not* particularly likely that they are 10x more valuable to FB.
Here's some random variables that might correlate with Facebook spend value that I brainstormed. Maybe they have some grain of truth within them:
* Linguistic diversity -> I get ads in german, because i live in Germany but my German level is not high enough to really understand the ads. The US is much less linguistically diverse. If you're an advertiser paying for an add in German and it lands on my screen, you're not going to have a high conversion rate.
* Cultural relationship to money, spending, banking, and credit - Germans do not take loans for example. My credit card in Germany doesn't really allow me to spend money I don't have. Back home in Canada when I turned 19 I was offered 15k in credit, for no reason. Banking laws are probably stricter in most of Europe. Consumer protection laws for banking probably restricts credit giving more.
* Data Privacy laws + GDPR. - Advertisers cannot track you as well because they have to ask your consent to store information.
* Average Wealth / income - Isn't income way lower in Europe? You could checkout this list, find the US and then check out Croatia and Poland for example https://www.worlddata.info/average-income.php
* Cultural Values -> Europeans are more likely to want time off rather than more money.
Europeans are more likely to have grown up in a communal society, ie the former soviet union, than US, maybe this has certain effects on behavior like perhaps valuing flashy status symbol purchases less than American's might..
* Smaller Flats - Europe is more densely populated, people live in smaller flats, there is less room for "stuff".
* Network pervasiveness of facebook. - How many of your friends are on facebook must affect your engagement level. Different populations have different percentages of facebook use i'm guessing. And I suppose your engagement level probably relates to your spend value for Facebook.
* availability of the internet
I admittedly just made these all up, and used my experience living in Germany, but I think some of these factors must affect the spend value.
Since I don't think I can edit comments, I will add that I don't think it's a uniquely American problem, and I don't intend the above argument as a refutation, but rather a modicum of supporting evidence that algorithmic/capitalistic incentives with an efficient Internet ecosystem/economy are a large factor at play here, and one that I think is often under-discussed. It's also likely that the 'base' causal factors involved are very complex, and so I might also be mistaking a downstream correlate as causal when more basic political analysis (e.g. in the book this post is about) may end up bearing more fruit for more-controllable causal factors.
"Facebook's average revenue per user in the US+Canada is $40 per quarter. Yes, if you use FB and live in the US, your expected value is $160 per year to FB! For a comparison, it is $12 per quarter in Europe, $4 in Asia, and $2 in the rest of the world. So, although Facebook has 200M users in US+Canada and 2B users worldwide, a FB user in the US is worth 10-20 times more revenue for Facebook."
???
40/12 = 3 1/3 not 10
I was intending the 10x comparison to be a generalization of the US vs. other countries, rather than the US vs. EU specifically (even so, 3x is still a big difference!)
Oh, it was $40 per quarter (US) vs $12 per quarter (EU). That makes more sense.
Also, I just got done watching a "legal systems very different from our own" lecture on youtube literally 5 minutes ago, and now I see a notification from David Friedman lol
I would recommend "Death by a Thousand Cuts", the documentary on Duterte and the opposition/free press in the Philippines. The protagonist/journalist hero asserts that the Phillipines is the most online country. Given the extreme crudeness and negative partisanship in contemporary Phillipine politics, I think this supports your argument or something similar.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/01/world-internet-usage-index-philippines-10-hours-a-day
@Nearcyan: I'm confused because you're quoting revenue numbers and talking about them like they're profit numbers. A US Facebook user's expected value to FB per year is $160 minus expected cost.
I don't know much about this, but how likely do we think it is that US Facebook users also cost FB more?
"It's kind of hard to type longer posts in Substack's current comment system, so this might be a bit rambling, but my thoughts are basically that the US is good at constructing efficient systems."
The irony !
One somewhat correlating feature is USA & UK have First past the post electoral systems, so 2 party politics (or thereabouts). Most other W European nations have tortuous multi party coalitions.
Big it up for Approval Voting (or something similar).
Yes! I think that, if you have a system that naturally leads to 2 parties, then those 2 parties will start defining themselves as Eagles and Rattlers (like in the Robber's Cave experiment). I think one way to prevent this is if the parties have enough _internal_ drama to prevent the formation of a single ingroup identity, like with the Dixiecrats vs. Democrats.
I've heard there's revisionism on Robber's Cave recently (as with Stanford Prison). A shame since I have cited that example many times. https://www.spring.org.uk/2007/09/war-peace-and-role-of-power-in-sherifs.php
Interesting! Thank you for the link.
I read the article and wasn't particularly convinced. The relevant part of the experiment here is that the two groups evolved some culture and deepened the differences when they became aware of each other, not that the experimenters orchestrated the following peace (which I'm sure is true).
(Also, the next article on that blog is a praise of Zimbardo's famous prison experiment, and not a word on the fact that it has rightly been called a fraud. I lost all respect for the author after that.)
"One somewhat correlating feature is USA & UK have First past the post electoral systems, so 2 party politics (or thereabouts)" That really isn't true for the UK. If you just look at England, you have the Conservatives and Labour, but there is also a third party – the Liberal Democrats – the Liberal Democrats have never been able to govern in their own right (although they are descended in part from the Liberal Party of the late 19th/early 20th centuries which did), but between 2010 and 2015 they were part of a coalition government along with the Conservatives. Move beyond England to the other constituent countries – Scotland is governed by the SNP; Northern Ireland has its own party system based on Unionist (primarily DUP, but also UUP and others) vs Nationalist (primarily Sinn Fein, but also SDLP and others) vs Neutral (Alliance). So the UK definitely does not have a hard two party system like the US does. It is better described as a soft two party system, in which at the national level there are two main parties, but third parties are represented in the national legislature and even sometimes can wield some genuine political power (through offering their support to one of the major parties in exchange for concessions.)
A hard two party system can't be blamed solely on first-past-the-post, because both the UK and Canada have first-past-the-post at a national level, but they have soft two party systems instead of hard ones. I think, in the US case, it is a combination of three factors: (1) first-past-the-post, (2) presidential rather than parliamentary system, (3) low level of geographically-aligned cultural diversity.
I don't have a source, but I've heard it mentioned that the big two in the US basically excluded anyone else from the presidential debates.
It also helps not having a president in the first place. In Canada the party leaders all debate together, as party leaders, not as candidates for government offices.
I think the groups that organize the debates usually have criteria like "anyone who is polling above 10% is in the debates". In the 1990s that meant that Ross Perot got to take part in some of the debates, but no one else ever gets close - usually because most of the public is clear enough on voting strategy in the layered first-past-the-post with electoral college, that there's very little chance of 10% of people preferring someone else.
It's interesting to note how France until recently had a system with 2 very dominant parties... then in 2017 both basically collapsed !
I'm willing to bet that some people blamed it too on social media...
I wrote this in my own post above but I think those countries are too small to make for a fair comparison. But also I'm not so sure it's the internet really either. I just think size is really important.
With the internet and social media technologies specifically, there is the added complication that by participating in that ecosystem different countries cease to be "independent" (or at least, uncorrelated) points of evidence on the charts.
In other words: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog#/media/File:Internet_dog.jpg
On the internet, nobody knows you are a dog, but *you are a dog who speaks English who understands that meme*. Not only you are an English-speaking dog, but because of dominance of the US in the anglophone internet, it is assumed that American politics are relevant to you, which has a sort of cultural Medusa's eye effect of making the American politics relevant to you, because that is everything you read (pre-YouTube) or watch (post-YouTube) on the internet concerns the US in some way. If you read an essay (or listen to podcast) about philosophy, I'd say the chances are the writer (podcaster) has been educated in the US from books written by professors affiliated with American universities, even if they talk about, say, continental philosophy (seldom featuring quotes in original French or German).
And this is not about the internet only, it is connected wider changes in the discourse. I took some classes in economics in university. If there were textbooks in addition to lecturer's notes, they were in English and published by US printers; I took more classes in philosophy: same thing there with some Finnish books; in mathematics, the subject I majored in, again the books I read were in Finnish (often quite old books!) and in English (often quite modern books!), though also from UK-based publishers and Springer that is from Germany.
I forgot to add my main point, which is: nowadays, lots of cultural and political stuff (including topics and outward expressions of political polarization) appear to be downstream from the US politics.
One could hypothesize an exact form of mathematical equations for a dynamical system that models the flow of information with terms such as the population differential between the larger and smaller body of population and their relative internet adoption rates. Level of literacy in general and in English language could also have terms (how likely it is that a random member of the populace reads anything, and in significant amounts on the internet), but dwindling now when streaming content (both video and audio) are becoming more and more popular.
The local leftist youth organization definitely got the idea to remove Mannerheim's statue completely independently without any aping of the US protests. Was pleasantly surprised to have it get shot down.
It was surreal, like cargo cult politics where you have to transplant US issues to Europe even if they don't make any sense.
The interesting thing about the Anglophone Internet's unity is that a decent amount of political issues simply *don't* map. The entire black-white US race issue is meaningless to anyone outside the US. We have race issues of our own, of course, but they don't map to that because we never had imported slave races (we have incompletely-genocided natives, we have scary foreigners, but the US rarely talks about their natives anywhere we can see and the scary foreigners of the UK or Australia are for reasons of geography not the same scary foreigners of the US).
I suspect this sort of thing might actually protect non-US Anglospheric politics from any bad effects of the Internet. The Internet can't differentiate between different Anglospheric nations, so to whatever degree social media outputs Shiri's Scissor it will output a *US* scissor due to their dominance. But because the other Anglospheric nations have different incendiary issues, a decent amount of those Scissor statements will have poor effect over here.
Yeah, there's some conflicting evidence here that I'd love to reconcile.
...on the one hand:
1. "Cross-Country Trends in Affective Polarization" (cited by Klein's follow-up article). Finds that other countries don't have relationship between internet usage and polarization. https://www.nber.org/papers/w26669
2. "Greater Internet use is not associated with faster growth in political polarization among US demographic groups" (note: same authors as above). Finds polarization has increased the most among the demographic groups least likely to use internet/social media. https://www.pnas.org/content/114/40/10612
...on the other:
3. "The Hostile Audience: The Effect of Access to Broadband Internet on Partisan Affect". Finds access to broadband increases partisan hostility, consumption of partisan media, and decreases in vote splitting. Based on differing broadband availability brought about by variation in state right-of-way regulations. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26379489
Re #1, maybe the US is just different? (Nearcyan mentions this in a sibling comment.) And maybe #2 and #3 aren't actually in conflict, because older people are more polarizable both via cable news and also via the internet when they finally get broadband access?
Facebook launched in 2004 in English only among college students. Just like rock music travelled to the rest of the world with a ten year gap... So did social media. Look at the role Facebook played in Myanmar in 2016. We are only now seeing the social media effect in other countries.
but that's not true, it was open to everyone in the world by 2006
Maybe. But in many counties just getting Internet access the stuck deals with mobile carriers to make Facebook traffic free somewhat recently. So you’d expect the effect to be delayed.
Those countries are hardly relevant. Look at the countries on the chart in the vox article, and provide some data on why "social media" as a cause makes sense for the US and not places with the exact same uptake at the exact same time.
I’m not sure that your premise is true. Do Norwegians use social media as much as Americans?
A more interesting comparison would be amount of time spent on Facebook and changing attitudes regarding politics.
It’s also worth pointing out - any change can have varying effects across multiple environments. A little more rain in an environment that’s adapted to it usually doesn’t cause flooding, that same amount in a semi-arid region could be catastrophic.
The assumption here is that all the listed “western democracies” are the same.
Smoking causes cancer, but not everyone who smokes gets cancer. Social media could cause polarization, but not every country with people using social media would become polarized.
Countries use social networks differently. E.g. Twitter is vastly more popular in the US than here in Europe, I think I remember that 20 percent of Americans use it, whereas I would be surprised if it were as high as 5% here. Also, there is no equivalent alternative, people just do not partake in the 240 characters nonsense as often.
I wish I knew which of those countries are or aren't two-party systems.
As an American, I largely understand what 'polarization' means with regards to a two-party, winner-take all system. I'm not sure I know what polarization looks like in a country with many parties and/or proportional representation. I'm not sure that the measures designed to capture polarization under one system would accurately capture how it manifests in a different system.
I think even in a two party system, there's a lot of things that "polarization" can mean. It could mean the parties becoming more ideologically coherent; it could mean the Overton window widening in both directions; it could mean alignment of political views with other aspects of identity; it could mean increasing dislike of the other party. I think all of these things have happened in the United States, but some of them much more than others (ideological coherence is way up; Overton window is only slightly wider). But at least some of these things make sense in a multi-party system, while others don't.
Two-party vs multi-party is a continuum (where the US happens to currently be at one extreme). The former Commonwealth countries have >80% of the seats won by the top two parties, and the other countries have less than that.
I think the measure is clever but clearly flawed, as the merging and splitting of parties has a large effect on it even if there is no change in affect.
As some others on this thread have pointed out, I don't think it makes sense to discuss social media and loss of geography as distinction phenomena: the former is the mechanism of the latter. And loss of geography should be understood as a catalyst in a reaction whose factors are red-tribe/blue-tribe cultural divisions that have existed for decades longer. In other words, social media doesn't *cause* polarization; it makes latent polarization manifest. Not all countries with rapid growth in social media use experience the same effect that we did because not all countries had the same degree of latent polarization present beforehand.
"Loss of geography" is a weird way to put it when contemporary polarization is a *very* geographic phenomenon - the Democrats are now an urban party and the Republicans are a rural party, with suburban areas split largely based on population density as well.
Unpack this as "geography losing its function as a barrier to interaction and preventer of conflict".
A very good point, and i don't think the other counties becoming less polarized are killing the argument, in fact it sort of goes along if you think of other countries as us states. Some states are tends to become quite uniformly blue or red, too...
as mentioned later, most other countries are small.... Especially if you consider online presence, there US is really huge, larger than it's population or even gdp: culturally it's still the only superpower (BTW, a big difference between Republicans and democrats : Hollywood. Democrats have the public face of America, the thing that imho makes we are not (yet?) in a multilateral world.
Almost all other countries are internet-small enough to not polarize, they even have a natural outgroup to rally against : the US... That and they are often much more uniform than the US which is an immigration country.
Other maybe big enough actors could be China (obviously no political polarisation with one party), india (i guess Muslim/hindu interfere), brasil (may be close)
Note : i'm not from the US, but from a (very small) Euro country
One possibility: People have a certain demand for politics as tribalism and entertainment, but America's is a hard act to follow.
In the US, major sports are basketball, gridiron football, and baseball. But the UK has seems to have settled on an equilibrium where sports fans are overwhelmingly focused on soccer (they call it football), with cricket and rugby as also-rans. Maybe on a global level, we've settled on more of a UK-style equilibrium, where American politics is the overwhelming entertainment focus.
In my limited experience, non-Americans are substantially more polarized about American politics than Americans are.
I want to say there is an asymmetric warfare going on where one side treats it as something serious, and the other side as entertainment.
But I'm not *really* sure I can say that the first side isn't full of entertainment-seekers, too.
Perhaps it is because social media and the Internet in general is so US-centric? I live in Sweden, and if I open Facebook/Twitter/etc I will be fed lots of culture war and "outrage porn" targeted specifically against US republicans. It's a common observation that many young people here can name more US politicians than Swedish politicians; it's a depressing testament to the virulence of the american culture war. But I don't think that young people learning to despise Republicans necessarily increases polarization *in Sweden* -- I think many people instead have a reaction like "thank God our conservatives aren't as off the rails as those guys".
I find it strange that our political-entertainment complex has made American politicians well-known in Sweden. Do you see these youths discussing American policy ideas as a result of their exposure to these politicians?
Here in Finland a local leftist party's youth org demanded the removal of a war hero's statue. I am sure they came to this idea completely independently and had been thinking about it for years before suddenly suggesting it more widely in 2020.
Same thing here - lefties wanted to tear down a statue of one our greatest scientists of all time (Linneus) because he had the _temerity_ not to hold current progressive racial views, back in the 18th century. They also got it into their little heads that Swedish police was exactly the same thing as the U.S. kind.
Around the 2016 Election, there where a 10 year old kid in a Swedish school (where I worked temporarily) who went around telling all the adults to not vote for Trump, until I reminded him, we where in Sweden and could not vote for any US precedent candidate.
Similar thing during UK BLM protests, where people were apparently talking about "the Feds" as if they were relevant. The people lived more on Twitter than in Britain.
I don't trust that finding, because it may very well be an artifact of the democratic rules. For example, in The Netherlands, big parties have relatively little disproportional advantage over smaller parties. So we have two leftist parties that vote nearly identically, whose supporters surely are very positive about the other party. Simply by combining these two parties, you'd make the measured polarization go up, even though nobody's beliefs would have changed.
The reason why these two parties are so similar is actually caused by polarization. One of these parties used to be a big tent leftist party that served working class to upper middle class people. After the party adopting 'third way' politics (where the party leader literally said that he was happy to abandon their socialist ideology), the working class support has disappeared.
Maybe the US problem is simply the "two big parties and nothing else" system. How about they get rid of that, and all that "first-past-the-post" voting? All of a sudden, they'd get a whole lot of nice parties to choose from, and it'd make actual sense to vote for them: Communist, Socialist, Green, Liberal, Libertarian, Conservative, Right-wing populist, Neonazi...
With more pluralism of points of view, there'd be less vetoism and less hating of the other 50%.
The drawback of course being a fractured parliament with three-parties coalitions which break down all the time and don't get anything done either. Maybe the truth is somewhere in between.
I think advancing technology has caused polarization to go from local to national to international. Educated western liberals are coalescing around a single pole with Donald Trump and American Republicans as the outgroup.
Germany, Norway, and Denmark only look less polarized because their outgroup is outside of their national borders. E.g., they're only non-polarized by the same standard by which Massachusetts, New York, California, Utah, and North Dakota are not polarized.
This is so true.
"Internet, and fast travel made national news more of a thing, and people switched from local-politics-as-part-of-daily-life to national-politics-as-entertainment"
When politics becomes entertainment, boarders don't matter anymore. We (the rest of the world) follow the US politics for the same reason we watch US movies and TV series, i.e. becasue you have a bigger and "better" entertainment complex.
That's not the only reason Germany looks less polarized (can't comment on Denmark or Norway). The main reason for Germany was that the Social Democrats split in two, with the right half being almost constantly in coalition with the Conservatives, while becoming more and more irrelevant. If you include their former left wing in the measures of polarization, it would probably stay as strong as ever.
As a side comment, other countries listed are considerably smaller. I think it is easier for non-ideology based national media to hold public attention in a smaller market. Also, don't know about the others but UK, Sweden, and Norway all have publicly funded TV and other news media (BBC, SVT, and NRK, respectively), which are directed to be politically neutral, by law in Sweden and Norway, and I think in UK as well. It would be interesting to see an informed comment on the situation in Germany.
The government media in Sweden are generally only considered politically neutral by those on the political left. E.g. in a poll a couple of years ago, 94% of Greens (left wing) and 28% of Sweden Democrats (right wing) expressed confidence in SVT. Private media in Sweden is also have clear political affiliations, with a crop of right-wing outlets gaining prominence since the rise of the WWW.
That is somewhat interesting, but SD is a kind of anti-establishment party, from which you would expect distrust of an establishment organization like SVT. Of course Sweden's whole political landscape is shifted relative to US, so from this perspective they are "the" right wing, but do you know what the numbers were for KD and M?
Social media does not affect small countries the same way. In Sweden we barely have our own national conversation, but instead just get flooded with memes (in both meanings of the word) from the larger English speaking world.
We get seeped into picking sides between tribe Republican or tribe Democrat. But these tribes don't split Sweden's population 50/50, and therefore don't form a stable basis for national politics. It's kind of weird rely.
Other countries are a lot more ideologically uniform than US, so there's less existing variation for any feedback loops to work on. There are negligible numbers of Christian fundamentalists in Western Europe, for example. If one looks at the percentage of creationists as a bad proxy, it's something like 40% in US and 5-10% in various European countries. Australia and NZ seem to be intermediate on this measurement.
Scott beat me to it, but it's really hard to imagine that this is a uniquely American/British phenomenon, and Germany meanwhile has the exact opposite trend, despite even better education/literacy/SES rates.
I thought that the far-right/Eurosceptics in Germany recently gained a lot of votes, with the result being that no other party was willing to talk to them. This doesn't fit well with the idea that polarisation there is falling. Maybe it's some kind of measurement artifact?
This is accurate imho, but it is important to note that the right-wing party AFD only has a share of 15%, so it's not a roughly 50-50 split as in the US. Nevertheless, many European countries current political climate seems to be less polarized across a left-right axis, but rather on a "populism-establishment" axis (or whatever you want to call it) where the established parties do not neatly map onto either side. So surveys which ask "how do you feel about the other parties" are going to miss that aspect.
If the US had a center-right and a far-right party, the split would probably be 50-25-25 or maybe 40-40-20. If Germany *didn't* have CDU, if the choices were limited to SPD or AfD or "throw your vote away", what do you think AfD's numbers would look like?
My guess would be around 70-30 or 80-20 for SPD, depending on whether or not migration plays a role in the election. AfD would however win in the states of the former GDR easily. SPD and CDU are nowadays really close in their policy positions (which in part made the rise of AfD possible in the first place), so most remaining CDU voters would switch to SPD instead of AfD. If however the two options were Green Party (recently the 2nd most popular party) vs AfD, a 65-35 split is conceivable, as many voters would probably be put off by perceived elitism and disinterest in the common man among the Green Party.
Depends what you mean with 'recently'.
https://dawum.de/#Umfrageverlauf
Yes, I would not like to reach some conclusion based uniquely on a few first-world countries. This may be anecdotical, but South America in general (Brazil definitely) seems quite polarized. Of course, many countries here were hard-hit by economical crisis, but even them.
A hypothesis that seems just as plausible to me: there is One True Internet Ideology that people get drawn to the more immersed they are in online culture; we've become polarised along the axis of how much we've picked up the One True Internet Ideology.
Seems to match up with demographic data, at least!
[An important part of this story is that the other countries in the data set started with cultures much closer to the One True Internet Ideology to begin with -- less religious, more socially liberal etc. I'd be curious as to what these graphs would look like for less wealthy nations]
Aren't wokism and QAnon both internet ideologies?
Wokism is much older than the Internet. It's a university ideology pushed in departments whose purpose is activism and not knowledge building.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the Netflix documentary - The Social Dilemma. Pretty good piece if you haven't seen it. As has been noted, polarization pays, and it's not all that hard to game the various platforms to promote it. On a barely related, and lighter, side note. My wife (of 40 years) and I are polar opposites according to the Meyers Briggs test - My INTP vs her ESFJ. Our barely survived the first couple of years. Luckily, we had a counselor who suggested we both take the Meyers Briggs test. That was a turning point, because we then realized that a *lot* of our conflict was based on basic differences in how we processed information, etc., and not because we were being intentionally mean to each other. We eventually came to appreciate our differences and now joke that "together we make something close to a single, sane human being." I wonder what would happen if the social media platforms started gaming them to emphasize unity instead of polarization?
I think the "negative polarization" bit works the same mechanics as that old unhappy customer adage: "your average unhappy customer tells 10 people about their experience, whereas the happy customer tells only three" (or whatever the numbers were...)
Did Klein discuss the hypothesis that, well, maybe the US is just too big and too diverse to continue to exist as a single entity in the absence of a totalitarian regime?
No, and you would need some reason to think that 200 million people including lots of Irish and Italian wasn't this, but 300 million including lots of Mexicans and Asians was.
(didn't mean to delete my comment but... I'll try again)
This could be where technology and reduction in geographic segmentation comes in. And, to your point, perhaps the US is ahead of other countries (tech-wise), with polarization in other comparable large/diverse countries being inevitable. Semi-related -- another example of this may be the UK exiting the EU, as race-based politics featured heavily in that decision.
Few countries are as large as the US. Many EU countries are practically city-states by comparison. https://medium.com/migration-issues/who-is-the-city-statey-ist-of-them-all-fccd76f8e683
300 million would be fine, but only if people mostly formed their own groups and did their own thing separately from others. The federal government is too powerful and state power is too centralized. Think about the point you made:
"Kansas would have its Kansas Republicans and its Kansas Democrats, centered around the median Kansas voter, and they would both do about equally well in Kansas. "
Local parties can be responsive to the specific facts and needs in their town or state; national parties rely on broad and inflexible ideological platforms because they can't address anything specific. This is one of the main reasons the US was supposed to have states be the primary unit of governance (positions in state legislatures used to be considered more prestigious than positions in the federal Congress).
Counterpoint: the US used to be very polarized along state lines (think Civil War) and now...is not. If the US fought a civil war today, the two sides would be urban and rural; a person living in Brooklyn has much more in common with a person living in Austin than they do with a person living in a rural area in upstate New York. States are becoming less and less relevant as a marker of political identity.
Agreed, but this says we should redraw the state boundaries and still have things done by states.
States might not be the ideal level, cities or counties might be better. But doing everything at the federal level is insane.
"Counterpoint: the US used to be very polarized along state lines (think Civil War) and now...is not."
U.S. is actually very polarized along state lines: https://againstjebelallawz.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/averagedeviation.png
That seems to suggest it's just on the slightly high end of average in state-line polarization. But in any case, it's very clear that to the extent there is polarization between states right now, it's only an accident of state lines happening to encompass urban areas or not. Any county or precinct level map makes clear that the state borders don't matter - population density does.
Say we assume the following:
* Dunbar's number is 150
* People will trust and care for a friend of a friend, and even a friend of a friend of a friend, but no further
* Functional human relationships require energy to maintain or they will devolve into conflict
If you just take those two assumptions, you end up with an upper limit in terms of how many people can form a stable, functionally social network: it's 150^3, which is about 3 million people. Beyond that, you'll have pairs of people who aren't friends of friends of friends with each other, and will have some negative interactions which don't get maintained or repaired, and thus things break down further.
I think the general assumption should be that as systems get larger, scaling problems get more difficult to solve. There seems to be a general belief that "the ideal system for managing the world of human affairs is"
- independent of technology
- independent of the number of humans involved
- can exist in a permanently stable state
Based on my understanding of history and distributed computing, I'd guess that instability should be the norm, and we should instead be asking why those other countries aren't more polarized.
I think the second half of this makes a lot of sense - there's no reason to expect scale-independence or technology-independence or stability. But I'm not convinced by the first part - there seems to be an important phase transition somewhere between small town and medium town, where people switch from caring because you know someone to a more impersonal kindness to strangers. And empirically, I'm not aware of any suggestion that there's a qualitative change in city behavior anywhere in the single millions of population.
There's going to be huge overlap when counting your friend's friend's friends. So the real number is far, far lower than 3 M. Even if I had 3M of them, I would have no way of knowing if a given person knew my friend's friend. Hence the original Dunbar number can be meaningful but 3 M is not.
If someone is outside my 3M group, I don't see why that would cause conflict, just indifference. You're more likely to have conflict with your friend's friend.
(Edit: sorry 3rd attempt at posting, maybe cause of learning curve but this comment system seems somehow unstable)
Is there not also a network effect where economies of scale come in? Where only a country large as an empire has the resources to commit to govt technology going into inventing the internet, etc, which effectively reduces the burden of managing such a large number of people under single umbrellas? I mean, that’s effectively why we made the collective decision that more centralization could be in order, and though that forces our attention more to the (dys)functions of the central government, somehow every other metric of how well this civilization project is doing would indicate that maybe mass frustration is fine.
But I guess my question is: Are larger or smaller countries more historically stable? (hard to decide to measure that per capita or per constitution)
I guess I don’t know enough about distributed computing to know what you’re really talking about, but it terms of telephone networks or physiological systems, my prior intuition is that the more anastomoses or redundancies, the stabler.
But wasn't there a deliberate effort made to amalgamate all the Hypenated-Americans into being simply Americans back then? The whole point of the daily morning recital of the Pledge of Allegiance seems to me to be for that very reason: get 'em when they're young, din it into their heads so that it's automatic and unconscious that Seosamh and Joseph and José and Giuseppe are all "Joe" once they get to Ellis Island and all Americans under the one flag in the one nation, no matter where they/their parents/their grandparents came from. Like this scene, starting around 6:12, from the 1946 film "A Matter of Life and Death" where the former individuals who are representative of countries prejudiced against England are replaced by individuals from the same countries who are now all "American citizen(s)".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwNELNSvPzI
That changed. Now everyone is Hyphenated-American. I think the origional impulse was not in the service of polarisation, it was to discover and celebrate ancestral cultures, but it warped or curdled easily into Identity Politics and once politicians find out "there's votes in this", then that is how it grows.
I don't think black Americans under Jim Crow felt very included in the American dream.
>But wasn't there a deliberate effort made to amalgamate all the Hypenated-Americans into being simply Americans back then?
My understanding is that the opposite is true, and people treated you very differently if you were for example: Irish, Italian, Mexican, indiginous, etc.
for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Irish_sentiment ctrl+f "No Irish need apply"
The simple answer is that 200 million people including lots of Irish and Italians was too big and diverse to continue to exist as a single entity. So we had a civil war and 100 years of severe organized crime and gang violence.
But 100 years of intermarriage plus the greatest homogenizing force in history (WW2) created a temporary respite.
> And he suggests granting statehood to Puerto Rico and DC, because if we guarantee that the Democrats always win, then the Republicans will have to change their strategy
I think people overestimate the effect that adding guaranteed-Democrat Senate seats would be. "Tentin Quarantino" on Twitter (https://twitter.com/agraybee/status/1276634862548647936) said in June:
> But if you were to add 4 Democratic senators tomorrow, you'd have 51 Democrats, still two short of the 53 needed for a majority in a senate with 104 people.
David Shor (https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/1277781856721743880) replied:
> I lot of the thinking here is driven by the inability to think through the derivative of the (50+x)/(100+x) function
The "always win" framing was mine, not Klein's. I'll edit the post.
Ah, I wasn't criticizing either way. I just think people ought to be more aware of this!
Thank you for the edit. Even if the two new states were solid D, the Senate would still have a strong R lean. Implying that it means that Democrats "always win" is false beyond any measure of rhetorical merit. It made the post feel like you were so motivated to throw some shade on the blue tribe that you stopped caring about accuracy.