I like this article a lot and would like to see it expanded upon further. Based on their visuals and explanation (without seeing equations) it looks like they'v

I like this article a lot and would like to see it expanded upon further. Based on their visuals and explanation (without seeing equations) it looks like they've modelled an individual's political alignment based on a number of orthogonal issues and based on how they see their peers. So if there were 3 issues (examples used were marijuana legalization, gay marriage and income tax) then there are 4 forces acting on each person - marijuana legalization, gay marriage, income tax, and pressure from peers. But their model could be expanded to account for people who are single issue extremists (e.g. a dot that isn't pulled to other dots but does pull other dots towards it), randomness or irrationallity (dots suddenly jumping, possibly to be pulled back or possibly not), and in general more variance in the weight of the force for each individual. Side note: Is there a field of political science that builds and works off of statistical models similar to how they did in this article? I know that basically the entire field of economics does this, but what about political science?