Quantifying Cleavage Depth and Cleavage Alignment

The alignment of cleavages is central to pluralist theories of democracy, integration, and conflict. Yet quantitative research on cleavages has tended to focus primarily on cleavage depth, leaving cleavage alignment comparatively underexamined. This paper introduces a simple regression-based decomposition method for quantifying both the depth and alignment of cleavages. It is shown how the measures overcome limitations of existing approaches to measure the depth and cross-cuttingness of cleavages. Large-sample properties of the proposed measures are proven, which allow for quick calculations of confidence intervals and hypothesis testing. An analysis of the American National Election Studies show that, contrary to recent accounts of social sorting, voting cleavages in the US remain largely cross-cutting.