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This is a the network of political attitudes in the US in 2021. (Thus, nodes - i.e. the circles - are not people๐ง but attitudes๐ฃ๏ธ).
In the top figure you see the colors based on response level to a survey (i.e. red=the most Republican response, blue=the most Democrat, grey=the neutral response, etc).
Interestingly, we find two very weird clusters. Indeed, while one cluster is mainly Democrat and the other mainly Republican, we see that the neutral attitudes are completely absorbed in the Republican cluster.
Even more surprising: three attitudes which should be mildly democrat (e.g. Abortion should be illegal: somewhat disagree) are still in the Republican cluster!
This is confirmed by looking at the self-identity associated to every attitude. Indeed, all but one of the attitudes in the Republican cluster were chosen by self-identified Republicans.
Why is that?
What these graphs are telling us is that Democrats had a very clear positioning on these items - i.e. if you are a Democrat you will strongly agree/disagree.
On the contrary, Republicans seemed to be way more scattered across different positions, ranging very widely from "Strongly Republican" to even include some "Mildly Democrat" positions.
Interestingly, this also tells us that expressions of neutral positions, will probably not be perceived as neutral, but as Republican attitudes...
Of course, this is a very simplified extract, and you can find all the detailed and rigorous information in the publication:๐
nature.com/articles/s4159โฆ
An even deeper study on the dataset can be found here:
bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11โฆ
Thank you to @Quayle and @Adrian_Lueders for their wonderful work on these articles!
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