Exploring the Polarization of American Elites Based on the Analyses of Candidates’ Statements During the 2020 Presidential Election

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article consists of three parts. The first contains a theoretical analysis of the phenomenon of US political polarization and discusses the main approaches to its explanation, primarily through the prism of the influence of political elites. The authors note a logical contradiction in the existing concepts, which postulate the existence of an “asymmetry” in the influence of elites on polarization in the United States, arguing that the contribution of the Republicans is more destructive than the contribution of representatives of the Democratic Party. The authors find the growth of political polarization, regardless of party preferences (while noting the importance of elite behavior as one of the central factors of political polarization). The second part examines the phenomenon of affective (or emotional polarization), based on the socio-psychological rejection of representatives of an alien political camp. Based on the results of a network analysis of a two-modal network consisting of pre-election messages and topics selected by the authors themselves, the author notes that all candidates, without exception, are prone to emotional affect as part of their election campaign. The third part is devoted to the study of positional (or ideological) polarization, in which the author, on the basis of Latent Dirichlet Allocation analysis, divides the corpus of campaign messages of candidates into separate topics and, through a comparative analysis, finds a significant distance from “bipartisan” topics (i.e. from the political center) among all candidates.