An affinity based opinion dynamics model for the evolving pattern of political polarization

Political polarization has been a subject that has attracted many studies in recent years. We have developed an opinion dynamics model with affective homophily effect and national social norm effect to describe this phenomenon. The time evolution of the polarization between the two parties and the spread of opinions within each party are affected by three factors: the repulsive effect between the two parties, the attractive and repulsive effects between the members in each party, and the national social norm effect that pulls the opinions of all members towards a common norm. The model is internally consistent and is applied to the simulation of the symmetric patterns of polarization and spread of the opinion distributions in the U.S. Congress and the results align well with 154 years of recorded data. The time evolution of the strength of the national social norm effect is obtained and is consistent with the important historical events occurred during the past one and half century.