The Measurement of Cross-cutting Cleavages and Other Multidimensional Cleavage Structures

Abstract

Many studies in economics and political science include the concept of ethnic diversity as a key independent variable in empirical studies. To date, however, only single-dimensional measures of ethnic diversity, such as ethnic fractionalization, have been available. In this paper, I define and measure three multidimensional characteristics of social structure-cross-cuttingness, cross-fractionalization, and subgroup fractionalization-and present a new cross-national data set comprised of indices along combinations of five cleavages: race, language, religion, region, and income. After addressing important definitional and measurement issues, I discuss the data and show how their inclusion in economic growth regressions reopens the theoretical debate regarding the influence of ethnic diversity, indicating the potential for these new indices to shed light on the role of ethnic diversity (and social structure more generally) with regards to a number of phenomena of concern to political scientists.

Historical origins of persistent inequality in Nigeria

“…To further confirm that geopolitical zone is a proxy for ethnicity in Nigeria, I use Selway's (2011) measures of cross-cuttingness and cross-fractionalization, where cross-cuttingness is based on a normalized chi-square statistic and measures "the degree groups on a first cleavage are identically distributed amongst groups on a second cleavage" (Selway, 2011). The cross-cuttingness statistic is calculated as below:…”

“…Cross-fractionalization is a version of the Herfindahl index and measures "the extent to which individuals who are in the same group on one cleavage are in different groups on the other cleavage" (Selway, 2011). The 15 The Afrobarometer is "an African-led series of national public attitude surveys on democracy and governance in Africa" (www.afrobarometer.org).…”

Horizontal inequality and ethnic diversity in Brazil: patterns, trends, and their impacts on institutions

“…These results are similar to the conclusions for GCOV, GGINI, and GTHEIL: a reduction of horizontal inequality. Selway's (2011) cross-country analysis revealed a world average CC value of 0.876 between race and income cleavages; this value is slightly greater than Brazil's CC. In this paper, we use labour income instead of income.…”

“…However, these important initiatives do not measure appropriate indicators for analysing horizontal inequality, limiting themselves to analysing mean income differences between different ethnic groups. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to measure horizontal inequality in Brazil through the synthetic indicators developed by Stewart et al (2010) and Selway (2011). Several Brazilian policy initiatives to address such horizontal inequalities (Jaccoud, 2009;Jaccoud & Beghin, 2002;Theodoro, 2008) further underscore the relevance of analysing trends in these areas.…”

“…religion) (McDoom & Gisselquist, 2015;Selway, 2011). If the fact that the individual belongs to a certain group in a cleavage does not infer anything about what group it belongs in another cleavage, then there is perfect crosscuttingness (Selway, 2011). The CC ranges from 0 (perfect reinforcingness) to 1 (perfect crosscuttingness).…”