Cross-cutting cleavage

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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]

Definition[edit]

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.[citation needed]

History[edit]

Political philosophy[edit]

Cross-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]

Sociology[edit]

The 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] ethnic censuses (Lieberman and Singh 2012) and economic growth (Selway 2011).[citation needed]

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).[citation needed]

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.[17]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ "The Federalist Papers - Democracy".
  2. ^ Simmel, Georg (1908). Soziologie. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. Cleavage translates as "Spaltung" in German
  3. ^ Goodin, R. (1975). Cross-Cutting Cleavages and Social Conflict. British Journal of Political Science, 5(4), 516-519. doi:10.1017/S000712340000836X
  4. ^ Gill, G. (2005). Paths to Democracy: Revolution and Totalitarianism. Perspectives on Politics, 3(3), 679-680. doi:10.1017/S1537592705800258
  5. ^ Simmel, Georg (1908). Soziologie. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. Cleavage translates as "Spaltung" in German
  6. ^ 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.
  7. ^ 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.
  8. ^ Gluckman, Max (1954). 'Political Institutions', in E. E. Evans-Pritchard, ed., The Institutions of Primitive Society. Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press. pp. 66–80.
  9. ^ Kroeber, A. L. (1917). Zu˜ni Kin and Clan. New York: The Trustees of the American Museum of Natural History.
  10. ^ Peter Michael Blau and Joseph E. Schwartz, Crosscutting Social Circles: Testing a Macrostructural Theory of Intergroup Relations (Orlando, Fla.: Academic Press, 1984).
  11. ^ 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.
  12. ^ 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
  13. ^ 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. S2CID 2531210.
  14. ^ 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. S2CID 12654372.
  15. ^ 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
  16. ^ 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
  17. ^ Desmet, Ortuño-Ortín and Wacziarg (September 2017). "Culture, Ethnicity and Diversity". American Economic Review. 107 (9): 2479–2513. doi:10.1257/aer.20150243. hdl:10016/25258.
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