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Political polarization represents a rising issue in many countries, making it more and more important to understand its relation to cognitive-motivational and social influence mechanisms. Yet, the link between micro-level mechanisms and macro-level phenomena remains unclear. We investigated the consequences of individuals striving for cognitive coherence in their belief systems on political polarization in society in an agent-based model. In this, we formalized how cognitive coherence affects how individuals update their beliefs following social influence and self-reflection processes. We derive agents' political beliefs as well as their subjective belief systems, defining what determines coherence for different individuals, from European Social Survey data via correlational class analysis. The simulation shows that agents polarize in their beliefs when they have a strong strive for cognitive coherence, and especially when they have structurally different belief systems. In a mathematical analysis, we not only explain the main findings but also underscore the necessity of simulations for understanding the complex dynamics of socially embedded phenomena such as political polarization.

The paper argues for, and discusses, the practice of “Strong Empirical Modelling”. This involves a shift in effort from the internals of a model towards how the model relates to observational data. This kind of modelling is contrasted to theory-based modelling which, it is argued, will not be sufficient for making substantive progress understanding social phenomena in a scientific manner, due to the inherent weakness of social theory. However, there are different ways of relating data to modelling, so these are reviewed and criteria for their strength and the difficulties discussed. A sketch of how to define the empirical strength of a model is discussed, and the piece ends with a suggested system of “Modelling Ready Levels” to eliminate confusion about the state of modelling projects.