Toward an integrated and globally equitable understanding of political polarization
Falkenberg, M., Cinelli, M., Galeazzi, A. , Bail, C. A., Benito, R. M., Bruns, A., Gruzd, A., Lazer, D., Lee, J. K., McCoy, J., Nagayoshi, K., Rand, D. G., Scala, A., Siegel, A. A., van der Linden, S., Varol, O., Weber, I., Wojcieszak, M., Zollo, F., Baronchelli, A. 
ORCID: 0000-0002-0255-0829 & Quattrociocchi, W. (2026).
Toward an integrated and globally equitable understanding of political polarization.
Nature Communications, 17(1),
article number 8338.
doi: 10.1038/s41467-026-76110-5
Abstract
Political polarization poses major societal risks, yet a globally relevant, interdisciplinary understanding remains lacking, as nearly half of all studies focus on the United States. We argue for renewed effort to bring global equity to polarization research, highlighting insights robust across countries, those unique to specific contexts, and key literature gaps. Closing these gaps means overcoming cultural and systemic barriers, including data-access restrictions and misaligned incentives. It also demands interdisciplinarity bridging traditional approaches and those addressing the polarizing role of the internet, social media, and AI. Otherwise, efforts to counter polarization, and its democratic harms, risk resting on unsuitable evidence.
| Publication Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2026. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. |
| Subjects: | J Political Science > JA Political science (General) T Technology > T Technology (General) |
| Departments: | School of Science & Technology School of Science & Technology > Department of Mathematics |
| SWORD Depositor: |
Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives.
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