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

The data are fully described in "The Measurement of Cross-cutting Cleavages and Other Multidimensional Cleavage Structures", forthcoming in Political Analysis and its supplementary appendix. There are 128 countries in the dataset. The Cross-national Indices of Multidimensional Measures of Social Structure (CIMMSS) contains 69 new indices for the following dimensions: Race, Ethnicity, Language, Religion, Income, Geography. There are six different characteristics contained in the dataset: (1) Cross-cutting Cleavages (Cross-cuttingness) definition: The degree groups on a first cleavage are identically distributed amongst groups on a second cleavage. For example, South Africa has a low level of racial-income cross-cuttingness, since Whites have much higher average incomes than Blacks. (2) Sub-group Fractionalization definition: The probability that two randomly chosen individuals in a society belong to the same sub-group (the intersection of two or more group identities/memberships on two or more cleavages). For example, Iraq has three main sub-groups: Arab Sunnis, Arab Sh'ias, and Kurdish Sunnis. (3) Sub-group (Bi)polarization definition: The degree that a country is divided into two equally-sized sub-groups. For example, Northern Ireland has two fairly evenly-sized sub-groups: Irish Catholics and English Protestants. (4) Cross-fractionalization definition: The degree that members of a group on one cleavage are divided into groups on a second cleavage and share membership on the second cleavage with members of other groups on the first cleavage. For example, White Australians are highly fractionalized among religions and share religious membership with other racial groups. (5) Fractionalization definition: The probability that two randomly chosen individuals in a society belong to the same group. For example, individuals in many Latin American countries tend to mostly belong to the same religious group, Catholicism (low fractionalization). (6) (Bi)polarization definition: The degree that a country is divided into two equally-sized sub-groups. For example, Belgium has two fairly equal sized linguistic groups: Walloons (French) and Flemish (Dutch).