Identifying opinion-based groups from survey data: a bipartite network approach

Abstract

A survey can be represented by a bipartite network as it has two types of nodes, participants and items in which participants can only interact with items. We introduce an agreement threshold to take a minimal projection of the participants linked by shared responses in order to identify opinion-based groups. We show that in American National Election Studies-data, this can identify polarisation along political attitudes.We also take a projection of attitudes that are linked by how participants respond to them. This can be used to show which attitudes are commonly held together in different countries or communities.

Social identity emergence in attitude interactions and the identity strengthening effects of cumulative attitude agreement

“…We added a positive edge if the participant agreed with the item and a negative edge if the participant disagreed. We then took a projection where we linked participants based on shared agreement MacCarron et al, 2020). We began with connecting all participants who agree on all 12 items, and then lowered this agreement threshold until most participants were in a giant connected component (i.e., a path can be made between almost any pair of participants).…”