Back to polarization: an epistemological review from social network analysis

The concept of political polarization increasingly appears in academic and media vocabulary. However, there is not a single definition of this term that allows us a structured and coherent production of knowledge in relation to its nature, determinants, and consequences. In this article, we make a proposal to define a variant of political polarization that occurs in spaces of digital public debate. We intend to offer one more resource to improve our capacity to analyze polarized social and media contexts. To meet this objective, we analyze set of bibliometric techniques (network extraction and community detection mechanisms) that have allowed us to establish the terms that structure the academic debate on political polarization in digital debate (co-occurrence of terms analysis), the co-citation analysis of cited references that group the most relevant works in this field, as well as its content. We have identified a series of common trends both in the term communities and in those defined from cited-references. We have verified that there are backbone elements of the academic debate on this topic. These elements have been used as the basis for our proposed definition that remarks the procedural character of political polarization in digital communication. This article may therefore be useful not only for social scientists, but also for communications experts and professional politicians interested in better understanding what political polarization is and its limits and spheres of influence.