Local Community Heterogeneity and Its Effect on Polarisation

The final ICA 2024 conference session I’m attending today is on polarisation, and starts with a paper by Seungsu Lee. His interest is in partisan political communication, and he introduces the idea of like-minded and cross-cutting news media use and its relationship with political talk in homogeneous groups, and their effects on knowledge and polarisation.

Conversely, partisan heterogeneity within the same local communities means that people are more likely to encounter cross-cutting political information and views, motivate them to seek additional information, have their partisan identities primed, and access political knowledge. This might be operationalised for instance by looking at the political homogeneity or heterogeneity of populations at a county level.

The project operationalised this using US data on three presidential elections (2012-20), and I’m lost in the overwhelm of regression data that is now on screen – it’s frankly difficult to extract the key findings here. Like-minded news use and homogeneous political talk appear to be strongly correlated, with a somewhat weakened relationship in politically diverse communities.