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Greater Internet use is not associated with faster growth in political polarization among US demographic groups - PubMed

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Greater Internet use is not associated with faster growth in political polarization among US demographic groups

Levi Boxell et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2017.

Erratum in

Abstract

We combine eight previously proposed measures to construct an index of political polarization among US adults. We find that polarization has increased the most among the demographic groups least likely to use the Internet and social media. Our overall index and all but one of the individual measures show greater increases for those older than 65 than for those aged 18-39. A linear model estimated at the age-group level implies that the Internet explains a small share of the recent growth in polarization.

Keywords: Internet; polarization; politics; social media.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of interest statement: M.G. is a member of the Toulouse Network of Information Technology, a research group funded by Microsoft. J.M.S. has, in the past, been a paid visitor at Microsoft Research and a paid consultant for a digital news startup; his spouse has written articles for several online news outlets, for which she was paid. L.B. declares no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.

Trends in political polarization. Each of the eight small plots shows the trend in a given polarization measure across time. The large plot shows the trend in the index, which is computed as the average across all polarization measures available in a given year after normalizing each measure to have a value of 1 in 1996. The shaded regions are pointwise 95% confidence intervals (CIs), constructed by using a nonparametric bootstrap with 100 replicates. Data are from the ANES. See main text for definitions and SI Appendix, section 3 for details on the bootstrap procedure.

Fig. 2.
Fig. 2.

Trends in Internet and social media use by age group. Each plot shows trends in Internet or social media use by age group. Left shows the weighted proportion of respondents that use the Internet by age group, using data from the ANES. Center shows the weighted proportion of respondents that obtained campaign information online by age group, using data from the ANES. Right shows the weighted proportion of respondents that use social media by age group, using data from the Pew Research Center. See SI Appendix, section 1 for details on variable construction.

Fig. 3.
Fig. 3.

Trends in polarization by age group. Each plot shows the polarization index for each of four age groups. Each plot highlights the series for one age group in bold. Shaded regions represent 95% pointwise CIs for the bold series constructed from a nonparametric bootstrap with 100 replicates. See main text for definitions and SI Appendix, section 3 for details on the bootstrap procedure.

Fig. 4.
Fig. 4.

Trends in polarization by predicted Internet use. The plot shows the polarization index broken out by quartile of predicted Internet use within each survey year. The bottom quartile includes values that are at or below the 25th percentile, while the top quartile includes values greater than the 75th percentile. Shaded regions represent 95% pointwise CIs constructed from a nonparametric bootstrap with 100 replicates. See main text for definitions and SI Appendix, section 3 for details on the bootstrap procedure.

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