Affective Polarization, Media Outlets, and Opinion Dynamics

Abstract

We study opinion dynamics in a social network consisting of two groups. Agents update their opinions by conforming to the opinions of agents from their group and not conforming to the opinions of people from the other group (affective polarization) and by listening a media outlet that is a possible biased source of information. We characterize the long-run opinions and provide the conditions under which affective polarization and media outlet lead to ideological polarization. We also study the effect of homophily and group size on long-run opinions when agents in the same group are homogeneous.

Keywords: Network, polarization, opinion dynamics, identity, homophily

JEL Classification: C7, D7, D85.