Election Polarization: Mapping citizen divisions through elections
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Elections can unveil citizens' enthusiasm and discomfort concerning political candidates, parties, and issues. While a substantial body of literature studies the election outcomes from the perspective of winners and losers, an under-explored condition to understand societal divisions emerges from citizen voting patterns. Here, we examine the concept of Election Polarization (EP) as a measure of citizens' divisions on Election Day. We present an agnostic approach that relies exclusively on election data and considers the competitiveness of candidates (Between-EP) and their voting dispersion throughout a territory (Within-EP). We use both synthetic data and presidential election results from France, Chile, and the United States to show that our approach successfully identified theoretical expectations of “polarized” elections. Furthermore, we validate its robustness over the election type, aggregation scale, use of abstentions/spoilt votes, and the number of candidates. Finally, our analysis reveals that state-level Within-EP and Between-EP in the U.S. are positively associated with political polarization and political interest, respectively, shedding light that EP could potentially encompass a simple and reliable measure of quasi-political polarization, opening the opportunity of studying this phenomenon both for regional level and lower/middle-income countries without electoral surveys.
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