Cross-cutting Cleavages & Democratization: A Study of Third-wave Democracies

• In Event: Civil Society, Protest, and Democratization

Abstract

Based on the observation that insufficient attention has been paid to the ways in which social cleavages interact with each other to influence countries’ prospects of democratizing, our paper seeks to explore the effects of cross-cutting cleavages on democratization. Utilizing a series of random effects models to analyze a time-series cross-sectional data set between 1972-2002, we draw upon Joel Selway’s multidimensional measures of crosscuttingness and cross-fractionalization along with Polity IV democracy measures, and key variables in the literature related to democratization. We find that religious-linguistic cross-cutting cleavages have a negative effect on democratization. We also argue that language and religion have the power to be transformative, but, when measures of cross-cuttingness are close to or near perfect and societies are linguistically and religiously homogeneous, the transformative power of these cleavages on democratization fails to materialize. We identify and explore cases that allow us to test and demonstrate the validity of our theory. This paper can potentially contribute to our understanding of democratization by adding more nuances of how crosscutting cleavages affect countries’ tendencies of democratizing.

Authors

• Zheng Wang, University at Albany, NY

• Keith A Preble, SUNY, University at Albany