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NOTE: If you are visiting after reading the APSA Representation and Electoral Systems Newsletter, please note that the dataset has FINALLY been updated. I am constantly adding countries to the dataset as data becomes available, so feel free to check with me. Also, if you know of a public opinion survey for a country that is missing, please contact me and I will add it to the dataset.
Access data here. Scroll down for Stata (.dta) and comma-delimited versions of "merge-ready" data. You can also download the data from Dataverse and ICPSR.
The stata version has labels with the full names and is saved in version 12.
The data are fully described in "The Measurement of Cross-cutting Cleavages and Other Multidimensional Cleavage Structures", in Political Analysis and its supplementary appendix.
Brief Description:
The Cross-national Indices of Multi-dimensional Measures of Social Structure (CIMMSS) contains 69 new indices for the following dimensions:
Race, Ethnicity, Language, Religion, Income, Geography. There are six different characteristics contained in the dataset:
Cross-cutting Cleavages (Cross-cuttingness)
Definition: The degree groups on a first cleavage are identically distributed amongst groups on a second cleavage.
Example: South Africa has a low level of racial-income cross-cuttingness, since Whites have much higher average incomes than Blacks.
Sub-group Fractionalization
Definition: The probability that two randomly chosen individuals in a society belong to the same sub-group (the intersection of two or more group identities/memberships on two or more cleavages)
Example: Iraq has three main sub-groups: Arab Sunnis, Arab Sh'ias, and Kurdish Sunnis.
Sub-group (Bi)polarization
Definition: The degree that a country is divided into two equally-sized sub-groups
Example: Northern Ireland has two fairly evenly-sized sub-groups: Irish Catholics and English Protestants
Cross-fractionalization
Definition: The degree that members of a group on one cleavage are divided into groups on a second cleavage and share membership on the second cleavage with members of
other groups on the first cleavage.
Example: White Australians are highly fractionalized among religions and share religious membership with other racial groups.
Fractionalization
Definition: The probability that two randomly chosen individuals in a society belong to the same group.
Example: Individuals in many Latin American countries tend to mostly belong to the same religious group, Catholicism (low fractionalization).
(Bi)polarization
Definition: The degree that a country is divided into two equally-sized sub-groups.
Example: Belgium has two fairly equal sized linguistic groups: Walloons (French) and Flemish (Dutch).
There are 155 countries in the dataset.
I have now posted the Excel Workbook again (I took it down because it tended to confuse people) with all the group-level data used to construct each country's index.
I use this dataset in my book forthcoming at Cambridge University Press, United They Stand. Represented They Fall and in a number of articles on civil war, economic growth, riots, and the number of parties. A second book-project entitled Designing Democratic Institutions in Sociological Contexts is under preparation. See Research for more information and access to these articles.
Data Usage:
If you publish using the data please let me know, so I can add your publication/conference paper title to the growing list. The following publications have used CIMMSS data:
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