Construct · 6 fields · 11 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
● jingle · one name, six constructs Nearest construct by meaningpolaritycompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to polarization is polarity.
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The distance between the policy positions of two parties or two blocs, or the degree to which a population's positions cluster at two poles rather than in the middle. Poole and Rosenthal fixed the elite version by scaling legislators' roll-call votes onto a single dimension, so that polarization becomes the gap between party medians over time; McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal's 2006 book traces that gap and relates it to income inequality. Fiorina and Abrams's review separates the elite finding from the mass public, where they argue the evidence for a spreading-out of opinion is much weaker. The construct is about where people and parties stand, not how they feel about each other.[1][2]
The gap between how warmly people feel toward their own party and how coldly they feel toward the other, treated as a form of social identity rather than a disagreement about policy. Iyengar, Sood, and Lelkes fixed it in 2012 with feeling thermometers, trait ratings, and a marriage question, and showed the affective gap had widened while measures of issue distance had not moved in step. The 2019 review by Iyengar and colleagues collects the evidence on its origins and consequences and keeps the two constructs separate by design. Affective polarization can rise while ideological polarization is flat, which is the whole reason for the second name.[3][4]
The asymmetric organization of a single cell along an axis: an epithelial cell with an apical and a basal surface, a budding yeast cell that grows at one end, a neuron with one axon and many dendrites. Drubin and Nelson's 1996 review framed the shared mechanism as a hierarchy: a spatial cue, its interpretation by signalling molecules, and the reorganization of the cytoskeleton and membrane traffic toward it. Polarization here is the process by which a symmetric cell acquires a front and a back. Nothing is split in two; one thing is made different at its two ends.[5]
Two related quantities. In physical chemistry, polarization is the separation of charge within a bond or molecule, and polarizability is how easily an applied field induces that separation; Atkins's textbook treats both as the basis of dipole moments and dispersion forces. In electrochemistry, polarization is the departure of an electrode's potential from its equilibrium value when current flows, and Bard and Faulkner treat the size of that departure, the overpotential, as the central measurable of electrode kinetics. Both are about a displacement of charge under a field, not a splitting of anything into two camps.[6][7]
The orientation of the electric field vector of a transverse wave as it propagates: linear, circular, or elliptical, or none if the field direction varies randomly. Hecht's textbook develops it from the superposition of two orthogonal waves; Born and Wolf give the general treatment through the Stokes parameters and the coherency matrix, which let partially polarized light be described by a degree of polarization between zero and one. The oldest technical meaning of the word, dating to Malus in 1808, and the only one on this map that describes a property of a wave rather than of a population of things.[8][9]
The tendency of a group's average position after discussion to be more extreme, in the direction the members already leaned, than the average of their positions before it. Moscovici and Zavalloni named the effect in 1969 after showing that discussion moved French students' attitudes toward de Gaulle and toward Americans further in their initial direction; Myers and Lamm's 1976 review generalized the earlier risky-shift finding into a shift toward the dominant pole on any judgment. The word here describes a movement of a group's mean, not a widening of the distribution. A group that polarizes in this meaning often becomes more uniform, which is the opposite of what the political-science meaning measures.[10][11]
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