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 focuses 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 measures of cleavage alignment and cross-cuttingness. Large-sample properties of the measures are derived based on the assumption of a misspecified regression model, which allows for quick calculations of uncertaity estiamtes. The decomposition is applied to the American National Election Studies from 1972 to 2020 to analyze voting cleavages to demonstrate its usefulness.