Understanding Ideological Divisiveness

In 2022, researchers at the Center for Collective Learning, together with Colleagues at IRIT and the Universite de Paris Dauphine, launched two digital participation platforms targeting the presidential elections of France and Brazil. These platforms (Monprogramme and Brazucracia), were constructed to perform as collaborative government program builders, allowing participants to select proposals extracted from the government programs of the candidates of each country’s election. We use this data to create estimates of ideological polarization, or divisiveness, which helped us estimate how each proposal divided the population. The results of these experiments were published online in 2023 in Nature Human Behaviour (link) and were covered by Journal Club at PNAS (link).