The Measurement of Ethnic and Religious Divisions: Spatial, Temporal, and Categorical Dimensions with Evidence from Mindanao, the Philippines
TLDR
Practical guidance is provided both for quantitative scholars working with these measures and for qualitatively-inclined empiricists and normative theorists wishing to interpret, evaluate, or otherwise engage the quantitative research on the merits and demerits of diversity.Abstract:
An ever-expanding body of empirical research suggests that ethno-religious divisions adversely impact a host of normatively desirable objectives linked to the quality of life in society, implicitly representing a strong challenge to multiculturalist theory and policies. The appropriate conceptualization and measurement of ethno-religious divisions has consequently become the subject of complex methodological debate. This article unpacks some of this complexity and provides a synthetic critique of how eight key measures each capture the notion of divisions and relate to each other conceptually, theoretically, and empirically within a divided society. It explores simple proportions, fractionalization, polarization, cultural distance, segregation, cross-cuttingness, horizontal inequality, and intermarriage indicators. Furthermore, instead of presenting national-level temporal snapshots of divisions as in much work, it purposely examines how measures also perform at more localized levels of analysis and over time, drawing on individual-level census data from one deeply-divided society, Mindanao, in the Philippines. Analysis underscores four major issues to which researchers should pay more attention: the sensitivity of measures to (1) the underlying causal mechanisms linking divisions with outcomes; (2) the social forces and methodologies shaping the identification and categorization of groups; (3) the passage of time and evolution of divisions; and (4) the level of spatial analysis. The article provides practical guidance and discusses the key implications of these points both for quantitative scholars working with these measures and for qualitatively-inclined empiricists and normative theorists wishing to interpret, evaluate, or otherwise engage the quantitative research on the merits and demerits of diversity.read more
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Why Men Rebel
TL;DR: Why Men Rebel was first published in 1970 on the heels of a decade of political violence and protest not only in remote corners of Africa and Southeast Asia, but also at home in the United States as discussed by the authors.
References
More filters
Book
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
TL;DR: Putnam as mentioned in this paper showed that changes in work, family structure, age, suburban life, television, computers, women's roles and other factors are isolating Americans from each other in a trend whose reflection can clearly be seen in British society.
Book
Justice and the Politics of Difference
TL;DR: Young as mentioned in this paper argues that normative theory and public policy should undermine group-based oppression by affirming rather than suppressing social group difference, and argues for a principle of group representation in democratic publics and for group-differentiated policies.
Journal ArticleDOI
Corruption and Growth
TL;DR: In this paper, a newly assembled data set consisting of subjective indices of corruption, the amount of red tape, the efficiency of the judicial system, and various categories of political stability for a cross section of countries is analyzed.
Journal ArticleDOI
Africa's Growth Tragedy: Policies and Ethnic Divisions
William Easterly,Ross Levine +1 more
TL;DR: This article showed that ethnic diversity helps explain cross-country differences in public policies and other economic indicators in Sub-Saharan Africa, and that high ethnic fragmentation explains a significant part of most of these characteristics.