DIVIDED investigates socio-economic and political divisions. The focus will be on two key defining challenges to our contemporary democracies: rising economic inequality and political polarization. We know that as economic inequality rises, political polarization rises too - and that inequality and polarization self-reinforce each other, triggering a democratically toxic vicious cycle. But we still lack convincing evidence as to *how* they are related, and as to the micro-foundations underlying political polarization (see: Jost et al. 2022). Studying these is central to devise appropriate interventions to both depolarize and reduce inequality.
The project will advance the "social mind" theory of political behaviour, and marry sociological and rational-choice approaches to democratic behaviour under inequality. Furthermore, the project is devoted to the advancement of social survey methodology too: we will test gamification in mass surveys, and we will deliver granular spatial datasets on economic inequality and (online and offline) social networks across Europe.
Project partners include Opinium Research, the UK Labour Party's Data & Insights Team, the London School of Economics Data Science Institute, the European Election Studies, and members of the Computational Social Science Team at Meta.