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, 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. The term's antonym is reinforcing cleavages", which would be the case of one of the ethnic groups being all rich and the other all poor. The term originates from Simmel (1908) in his work Soziologie.[1]

Definition

In 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. The term's antonym is "reinforcing cleavages", which would be the case of one of the ethnic groups being all rich and the other all poor. The term originates from Simmel (1908) in his work Soziologie.[2]

History

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.[3][4][5][6]

Sociologists have used the term, especially in the sub-field of Macro Sociology. Peter Blau's work is the most well-known.[7]

The concept of cross-cutting cleavages is perhaps most heavily used in the field of Political Science. Cross-cutting cleavages were originally suggested as a mechanism for political stability, as no group can align all its members along a uniform cleavage-based platform, but rather has to appeal to members of the group that are spread throughout the groups created by other cleavages. The most in-depth discussion of this process is that by Seymour Martin Lipset in his 1960 book Political Man.

Stein Rokkan wrote a classic essay on crosscutting cleavages in Norway.[8][9]

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. Around the same 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.

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.[10][11]

Several scholars have written on how cross-cutting cleavages relates to ethnic voting,[12] civil war,[13], ethnic censuses (Lieberman and Singh 2012) and economic growth (Selway 2011).

Selway (2011) suggested a new measure for crosscutting cleavages and published a crossnational dataset on crosscutting cleavages among several dimensions (ethnicity, class, geography and religion).

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.[14]

See also

References
  1. Simmel, Georg (1908). Soziologie. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. Cleavage translates as "Spaltung" in German
  2. Simmel, Georg (1908). Soziologie. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. Cleavage translates as "Spaltung" in German
  3. Beteille, A. (1960). "A Brief Note on the Role of Cross-Cutting Alliances in Segmentary Political Systems". Man. 60: 181–2. doi:10.2307/2797647. JSTOR 2797647.
  4. Evans-Pritchard, E. (1940). "The Nuer of the Southern Sudan". In M. Fortes; E. Evans-Pritchard (eds.). African Political Systems. London: Oxford University Press. pp. 272–96.
  5. Gluckman, Max (1954). 'Political Institutions', in E. E. Evans-Pritchard, ed., The Institutions of Primitive Society. Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press. pp. 66–80.
  6. Kroeber, A. L. (1917). Zu˜ni Kin and Clan. New York: The Trustees of the American Museum of Natural History.
  7. Peter Michael Blau and Joseph E. Schwartz, Crosscutting Social Circles: Testing a Macrostructural Theory of Intergroup Relations (Orlando, Fla.: Academic Press, 1984).
  8. Lipset, Seymour Martin, and Stein Rokkan. 1967. "Cleavage Structures, Party Systems,and Voter Alignments." In: Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives, eds. Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan. New York: The Free Press pp. 1–64.
  9. Stein Rokkan, "Geography,Religion and Social Class: Cross Cutting Cleavages in Norwegian Politics," in S. M. Lipset and S. Rokkan, eds., Party Systems and Voter Alignments (New York, 1967), 368-369
  10. Mutz, Diana C. (March 2002). "Cross-cutting Social Networks: Testing Democratic Theory in Practice". American Political Science Review. 96 (1): 111–126. doi:10.1017/S0003055402004264. ISSN 1537-5943.
  11. Mutz, Diana C. (2002). "The Consequences of Cross-Cutting Networks for Political Participation". American Journal of Political Science. 46 (4): 838–855. doi:10.2307/3088437. JSTOR 3088437.
  12. THAD DUNNING and LAUREN HARRISON Cross-cutting Cleavages and Ethnic Voting: An Experimental Study of Cousinage in Mali American Political Science Review,Vol. 104, No. 1, February 2010, doi:10.1017/S0003055409990311
  13. Joshua R. Gubler, Joel Sawat Selway. Horizontal Inequality, Crosscutting Cleavages, and Civil War. Journal of Conflict Resolution. Volume 56, issue 2, pages 206-232, April 29, 2012
  14. Desmet, Ortuño-Ortín and Wacziarg (September 2017). "Culture, Ethnicity and Diversity". American Economic Review. 107 (9): 2479–2513. doi:10.1257/aer.20150243.
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