The Erosion of Visible Moderation: Endogenous Salience Tilting and Political Polarization

Abstract

This paper explains how the visible moderate center can erode without requiring rapid changes in underlying beliefs. Citizens hold latent views across multiple political dimensions. Engagement systems reveal and amplify the dimensions where disagreement is most intense, changing the public projection weights that map latent beliefs into a visible political axis.

The model generates a projection-rotation mechanism. When active attention is ordered toward high-conflict dimensions, visible political variance expands even if the latent belief distribution changes little. Under a visible-tail regularity condition, this variance expansion appears as a thinner moderate center and a larger extreme share. A two-block case makes the intuition transparent: high-conflict issues receive positive projection wedges, low-conflict issues receive negative wedges, and the visible axis rotates away from the mainstream-media benchmark. The electoral implication is that campaigns compete not only to persuade voters, but also to locate voters on a changing public political map. The paper therefore treats polarization as partly a visibility problem: what citizens appear to believe depends on which dimensions the attention system makes politically legible.

Keywords: political polarization, visible moderation, salience, social media, projection rotation, political behavior

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