The increasingly popular concept of polarization is used to describe various social phenomena such as political, opinion, health and income polarization. Despite this popularity it is still debated within disciplines how polarization should be conceptualized and how it should be measured. In this study I attempt to provide a systematic, interdisciplinary overview of the conceptual and measurement literature on polarization. I first describe the challenge of conceptualizing polarization, a task that requires taking decisions about how to aggregate individual positions on one or more scales. Different distributional aspects may matter and the concept’s meaning is related to the measurement level of the underlying scales. Subsequently, I review various polarization measures that have been developed during the last decades.
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Paul Cornelius Bauer (2019) studied this question.