Preferential Polarization Measures

Given opinions of members of a society on a set of policies, as ordinal preferences; an approach to polarization is introduced. The concept here is considering polarization in a society as an aggregation of pairwise antagonisms, which depend on identi fication within groups as well as alienation among groups. Among measures which comply to this sort of conceptualization, a class of functions which satisfi es certain plausible properties is introduced for the case of three alternatives. This class coincides with the class characterized for unidimensional spaces in Esteban and Ray (1994).