CSI’s Inequality Discussion Groups bring together Cornell faculty and graduate students from around campus to discuss and improve their in-progress research.

Title: Cleavages, Polarization, and Inequality

Abstract: Whether social dimensions align or cross-cut each other shapes a wide range of social phenomena including polarization, inequality, and integration. In this talk, I focus on the case of political cleavages, the alignment of which has been central to pluralist theories of democracy and conflict. I introduce a simple regression-based decomposition method for quantifying both the depth and alignment of cleavages, and track how the partisan cleavage structure in the US has changed from 1977 to 2022. The analysis shows that the depth of individual cleavages---especially race and religiosity---has increased. However, I also find increasing dealignment between cleavages, especially among the deepest ones, producing growing cross-pressures rather than consistent pressure towards either party. The results provide an important qualification to the influential "social sorting" thesis, which argues that partisanship has become a mega-identity that is both indicative of and subsumes other social identities. I conclude by discussing how the concepts and methods developed here can be applied to the study of other social structures, particularly categorical inequalities.