A Radical Vision of Radicalism: Political Cynicism, not Incrementally Stronger Partisan Positions, Explains Political Radicalization
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Is political radicalization a product of increased issue position polarization, by which left and right‐wing attitudes become ever more extreme? We argue that this is not the best explanation. Indeed, radical left and right supporters are not so much “left” or “right” in terms of their ideological attitudes. Instead, we argue that political cynicism is a relevant ideological attitude, with radicals being characterized by distinctly high levels, making them truly distinct from moderates. Radicals are primarily driven by anger, more than by anxiety, meaning that their information processing is heavily focused on consistency and closure. We discuss that political cynics have become highly effective as a political force, and we offer suggestions for how traditional parties may overcome the “trust crisis” in politics. It is concluded that issue‐position polarization is a phenomenon that operates to an equal extent in moderate voters than in adherents of radical and populist parties. The abyss between moderates and radicals concerns whether or not “to be in the political system” at all.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".