  The simplified hypothesis that an election is polarized as an explanation of
recent electoral outcomes worldwide is centered on perceptions of voting
patterns rather than ideological data from the electorate. While the literature
focuses on measuring polarization using ideological-like data from electoral
studies-which are limited to economically advantageous countries and are
representative mostly to national scales-we argue that, in fact, voting
patterns can lead to mapping effective proxies of citizen divisions on election
day. This paper perspectives two complementary concepts, Election Polarization
(EP) and Election Competitiveness (EC), as a means to understand voting
patterns on Election Day. We present an agnostic approach that relies solely on
election data and validate it using synthetic and real-world election data
across 13 countries in the Eurozone, North America, Latin America, and New
Zealand. Overall, we find that we can label and distinguish expectations of
polarized and competitive elections in these countries, and we report that EP
positively correlates with a metric of political polarization in the U.S.,
unlocking opportunities for studies of polarization at the regional level and
for lower/middle-income countries where electoral studies are available, but
surveys are limited.
