Understanding political divisiveness using online participation evidence from the 2022 French and Brazilian presidential elections

Navarrete, C. et al. (2023) Understanding political divisiveness using online participation evidence from the 2022 French and Brazilian presidential elections. Nature Human Behaviour, (doi: 10.1038/s41562-023-01755-x) (PMID:37973828) (Early Online Publication)

Abstract

Digital technologies can augment civic participation by facilitating the expression of detailed political preferences. Yet, digital participation efforts often rely on methods optimized for elections involving a few candidates. Here we present data collected in an online experiment where participants built personalized government programmes by combining policies proposed by the candidates of the 2022 French and Brazilian presidential elections. We use this data to explore aggregates complementing those used in social choice theory, finding that a metric of divisiveness, which is uncorrelated with traditional aggregation functions, can identify polarizing proposals. These metrics provide a score for the divisiveness of each proposal that can be estimated in the absence of data on the demographic characteristics of participants and that explains the issues that divide a population. These findings suggest that divisiveness metrics can be useful complements to traditional aggregation functions in direct forms of digital participation.

• Item Type: Articles
• Additional Information: This project was supported by the Artificial and Natural Intelligence Toulouse Institute – 3IA Institute: ANR-19-PI3A-0004, the French National Research Agency (ANR) under grant ANR-17-EURE-0010 (Investissements d’Avenir programme), the EUROPEAN RESEARCH EXECUTIVE AGENCY (REA) (https://doi.org/10.3030/101086712), and by the European Lighthouse of AI for Sustainability, HORIZON-CL4-2022-HUMAN-02 project ID: 101120237. The work of U.G. and R.C. were supported by ANR JCJC project SCONE (ANR 18-CE23-0009-01). J.L.’s work was funded in part by the French government under management of Agence Nationale de la Recherche as part of the ‘Investissements d’avenir’ programme, reference ANR-19-P3IA-0001 (PRAIRIE 3IA Institute).
• Status: Early Online Publication
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Colley, Dr Rachael
• Authors: Navarrete, C., Macedo, M., Colley, R., Zhang, J., Ferrada, N., Mello, M., Lira, R., Bastos-Filho, C., Grandi, U., Lang, J., and Hidalgo, C.
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science
• Journal Name: Nature Human Behaviour
• Publisher: Nature Publishing Group
• ISSN: 2397-3374
• ISSN (Online): 2397-3374
• Published Online: 16 November 2023
• Data DOI: 10.7910/DVN/8E0EA4