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Cross-cutting cleavage
In social sciences, a cross-cutting cleavage exists when groups on one cleavage overlap among groups on another cleavage. "Cleavages" may include racial, political, and religious divisions in society. Formally, members of a group j on a given cleavage x belong to groups on a second cleavage y with members of other groups k, l, m, etc. from the first cleavage x. For example, if a society contained two ethnic groups that had equal proportions of rich and poor it would be cross-cutting. Robert A. Dahl built a theory of Pluralist democracy which is a direct descendant of Madison's cross-cutting cleavages.[1] Cross-cutting cleavages are contrasted with reinforcing cleavage (e.g. a situation where one ethnic group is all-rich and the other is all-poor). The term originates from Simmel (1908) in his work Soziologie.[2] DefinitionIn social sciences, a cross-cutting cleavage exists when groups on one cleavage overlap among groups on another cleavage. "Cleavages" may include racial, political, religious divisions in society. Formally, members of a group j on a given cleavage x belong to groups on a second cleavage y with members of other groups k, l, m, etc. from the first cleavage x. For example, if a society contained two ethnic groups that had equal proportions of rich and poor it would be cross-cutting.[citation needed] HistoryPolitical philosophyCross-cutting cleavages are perhaps most heavily referenced in political philosophy. James Madison's commentary on the concept in Federalist No. 10 contributed substantially to the development of the idea of cross-cutting cleavages.[3][4] Madison argued the fractious nature of factions would be a mechanism for political stability and prevent a tyranny of the majority. Because no group can align all members along a single cleavage, they will instead be forced to build a broad base of support by seeking the approval of many different factions, preventing a simple "majority dictatorship" where one group making up a bare majority could (for example) expropriate all the property of another group. An in-depth discussion of this process is given by Seymour Martin Lipset in his 1960 book Political Man.[citation needed] Cross-cutting theory was applied to such topics as social order, political violence, voting behaviour, political organization and democratic stability, for example Truman's The Governmental Process, Dahl's A Preface to Democratic Theory, among others.[citation needed] Around the same[which?] time, several scholars (including Lipset himself) suggested ways to measure the concept, the best-known being Rae and Taylor's in their 1970 book The Analysis of Political Cleavages. Due to data limitations, these theories were generally left untested for a couple of decades.[citation needed] SociologyThe term originates from Simmel (1908) in his work Soziologie.[5][page needed] Anthropologists used the term heavily in the first few decades of the 20th century, as they brought back descriptions of non-Western societies throughout Asia and Africa.[6][7][8][9] Peter Blau's work further refined the idea.[10] Stein Rokkan wrote a classic essay on cross-cutting cleavages in Norway.[11][12] Diana Mutz revived the concept in the early 2000s, looking at political participation and democratic theory using survey data in the US and other Western European democracies.[13][14] Several scholars have written on how cross-cutting cleavages relates to ethnic voting,[15] civil war,[16] and ethnic censuses.[17] In 2011, Selway suggested a new measure relevant to economic growth for crosscutting cleavages and published a crossnational dataset on crosscutting cleavages among several dimensions (ethnicity, class, geography and religion).[18] Desmet, Ortuño-Ortín and Wacziarg (2017), in the American Economic Review, derive and discuss several measures of cross-cuttingness and compute them using data on ethnic identity and cultural values.[19] See alsoReferences
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