Navigating Multidimensional Ideologies with Reddit's Political Compass: Economic Conflict and Social Affinity

TL;DR

This study reframes online political discourse by embedding Reddit interactions in a multidimensional political compass with economic (left–right) and social (libertarian–authoritarian) axes, plus demographic attributes. Using self-declarations from two Reddit communities and demographic inferences, it builds directed interaction networks and compares them to a degree-preserving null model to separate ideology-driven structure from random chance. The authors find robust homophily along the social axis and heterophily along the economic axis, with cross-group interactions exhibiting higher toxicity, and demonstrate that a combined, feature-rich model can disentangle these effects from demographic confounds. The work reconciles conflicting findings in prior literature and provides a framework for multidimensional opinion dynamics analysis with potential applications in modeling and intervention strategies on social platforms.

Abstract

The prevalent perspective in quantitative research on opinion dynamics flattens the landscape of the online political discourse into a traditional left--right dichotomy. While this approach helps simplify the analysis and modeling effort, it also neglects the intrinsic multidimensional richness of ideologies. In this study, we analyze social interactions on Reddit, under the lens of a multi-dimensional ideological framework: the political compass. We examine over 8 million comments posted on the subreddits /r/PoliticalCompass and /r/PoliticalCompassMemes during 2020--2022. By leveraging their self-declarations, we disentangle the ideological dimensions of users into economic (left--right) and social (libertarian--authoritarian) axes. In addition, we characterize users by their demographic attributes (age, gender, and affluence). We find significant homophily for interactions along the social axis of the political compass and demographic attributes. Compared to a null model, interactions among individuals of similar ideology surpass expectations by 6%. In contrast, we uncover a significant heterophily along the economic axis: left/right interactions exceed expectations by 10%. Furthermore, heterophilic interactions are characterized by a higher language toxicity than homophilic interactions, which hints at a conflictual discourse between every opposite ideology. Our results help reconcile apparent contradictions in recent literature, which found a superposition of homophilic and heterophilic interactions in online political discussions. By disentangling such interactions into the economic and social axes we pave the way for a deeper understanding of opinion dynamics on social media.

Figures (15)

• Figure 1: The political compass lester1996political: the horizontal axis delineates the economic ideologies, moving from left (equality-focused) to right (liberty-focused), and represents views on resource allocation. The vertical axis delineates the social ideologies, from libertarian at the bottom to authoritarian at the top, and represents views on personal freedom.
• Figure 2: Composition of /r/PC in terms of the number of users and comments classified by political ideology.
• Figure 3: For each axis (social and economic) displayed in the rows, and for each user characteristic (age, gender, affluence, partisanship) displayed in the columns, the plot shows the average quantile score and its 95% confidence intervals for /r/PC. Libertarians tend to be older, while right-leaning users are predominantly male. Left-leaning users are more likely to be female. Additionally, a correlation between partisanship and the left--right economic axis emerges, which further validates our data collection methodology.
• Figure 4: Odds ratios between empirical and random conditional probabilities of interaction for /r/PC, with respect to social (left) and economic (right) axes. The interactions show a homophilic pattern on the social axis (higher values in the main diagonal) and a heterophilic one on the economic axis (higher values in the anti-diagonal).
• Figure 5: Odds ratio (exponentiated logistic regression coefficients) for each ordered pair of interacting features on /r/PC. The source user is in the rows and the target user in the columns. Only coefficients significant at the $\alpha=5\%$ level are shown. The results show homophily in the demographic attributes with higher values in the main diagonal.