Figure 4

Polarization in the U.S. general public in comparison with our model. For the U.S. general public, we show the ideology distributions for Democrats (blue disks) and Republicans (red disks). The dataset is based on a survey conducted by Pew Research Center (see [6] for details). We initialized our model (grey solid lines) with the data of 1994 and only modified the distributions according to a transition probability rescaling as described by Eqs. (10) and (11)