The Journal of Economic Inequality

, Volume 10, Issue 1, pp 45–74 | Cite as

The conceptualization and measurement of social polarization

Article
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Abstract

The conceptualization and measurement of social polarization has received little attention from the literature. The Reynal-Querol (RQ) index, the only measure that has been used to measure religious or ethnic polarization in the literature, does not take into account alienation between individuals, a fundamental component in a polarization index. In this paper we present two axiomatically characterized social polarization indices incorporating this alienation component: the first one focuses on between group alienation only and the second one takes also into account alienation within groups. Our empirical results using data from the World Value Surveys suggest that the new indices might be good predictors of the occurrence of conflict.

Keywords

Income polarization Social polarization Alienation Axiomatics 
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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC. 2010

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.West Sibley Hall, Department of City and Regional PlanningCornell UniversityIthacaUSA

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