Social Cleavages

The fundamental question of "who belongs?" is an increasingly acute one in every part of the globe. Matters of identity divide societies on every inhabited continent. Religion, ethnicity, skin color, age, sexual orientation, and race, among other identity groups, are shaping politics everywhere. Societies are polarizing around these fundamental axes, as demagogic political leaders promise to keep outsiders away. Xenophobia is on the rise, and anti-immigrant sentiment swells in a period of mass migration.

To what extent do societies, fracturing along these dimensions of difference, strive or even successfully bridge these social cleavages with fair and inclusive policies? In this, our fifth annual Inclusiveness Index report, we strive to answer this question, not simply by reference to particular policies or initiatives, but by examining the data to track how marginalized populations actually fare relative to dominant groups.

The Othering & Belonging Institute's Inclusiveness Index is one of the first indices that measures equity without regard for national wealth or economic conditions. One of the challenges in measuring inclusivity is that it is difficult to disentangle policies aimed at inclusivity from the investments and resources available to marginalized communities. They are often the same and can be conflated. We surmount this challenge by focusing on policies, laws, and outcomes rather than government expenditures or investments. The Inclusiveness Index is uniquely focused on the degree of inclusion and marginality rather than a more general assessment of group-based well-being.
In addition to assessing how inclusive various societies are, the Inclusiveness Index serves as a diagnostic tool. It helps us identify places and societies that are improving, in terms of developing a more inclusive polity and set of institutions, and those places where societies are fracturing and becoming more divided along these lines. The data tells the main story, but we also seek to surface stories and trends that lie beneath the data.

In our conception, inclusiveness entails access to power and public and private resources, and it improves the way society views marginalized group members. Inclusivity is realized when historically or currently marginalized groups feel valued, when differences are respected, and when basic and fundamental needs and rights- relative to those societies' dominant groups-are met and recognized. Our index focuses on social groups rather than individuals, as marginality often occurs as a result of a group membership.

We operationalize this definition of "inclusivity" by focusing primarily on the performance of groups that span salient social cleavages, such as gender, race, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation. We realize that such an approach cannot fully account for the unquantifiable or more qualitative aspects of belonging and inclusivity. For that reason, each version of the Inclusiveness Index report highlights stories and themes that go beyond the data.

Thus, each issue looks for patterns or stories that lay behind the data and touch on issues of inclusivity both across the globe and within the United States. Our 2016 report examined the global migrant crisis. Our 2017 report focused on the rise of ethnonationalism. Our 2018 report surveyed the reckoning brought about by the global #MeToo movement and the growing global water crises. For 2019 we took a closer look at the role of social media in spreading hate and falsehoods, and how global leaders are responding. And in this 2020 report, we focus on the responses nationally, and globally, to the COVID-19 crisis.

As always, a word of caution: our rankings are not the final word on inclusivity nor a definitive assessment of any national or state performance. Rather, they are intended to spark a conversation and generate further inquiry into how and why some places, communities, and nations are more inclusive than others.

Please be sure to send us your suggestions, feedback, and ideas. Additional information about this project, including past reports and downloadable data files, is available at belonging.berkeley.edu/inclusivenessindex.

To overcome the metaphoricality of the term "political space" that is an actual for political sociology, the concept that is point- ed by this metaphorical term, is being criticized. The derivative metaphor "destruction of political space" is used to analyze the Ukraine crisis. A retrospective analysis of the preconditions of the crisis and events that resulted in the change of power in 2014 shows that the derivative metaphor can effectively work in political sociology in the study of macro-political processes.

Despite its undoubted contributions and originality, several authors have been pointing out the limitations of Ernesto Laclau's theory of Populism, mainly from the developments in The Populist Reason. Whether because of its formalism, the opposition  between  Mobilization  and  Institutionalization  (shared  with  Chantal Mouffe) or the conflation of populist logic with that of politics in general, recent criticisms aim to go beyond Laclau. In this article we seek to sociologize Laclau's theory including in its formal logic an ontic and structural logic linked to cleavage theory. From this perspective, we propose to understand populism as a project and a  political  regime  that  is  explained  by  what  we  call  a  Populist  Process  that distinguishes three instances: moment, phenomenon and regime. For this purpose we make, in the first place, a general reference to the formal character of the populist articulation and how the mobilization-institutionalization border is built in Laclau and Mouffe; then we inquire about what we mean by populist process; and finally, we raise the possibility of studying populism from a logic based on what we have called horizontal and vertical cleavages, a proposal that although it is not dependent on processual theory, converses with it by also demanding a perspective of sociological analysis and not only of political events when talking about populist cleavage.

In this special issue, we focus on the relationship between populism and ethnic and religious diversity beyond Western Europe and the Americas. We are particularly interested in the following questions: What is the role of cultural and social grievances in the emergence and spread of populist discourses and vice versa? What differences, if any, are there between the form populism takes in historically diverse societies and the form it takes in societies where diversity is a fairly recent phenomenon related to immigration? How does populism relate to social, political, and affective polariza- tion in post-imperial societies with multi-cultural populations?

What methods are used and what methodological issues are involved when Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) compare voter and party policy stances? This article examines these questions by describing a newly developed methodology to code party positions on salient political issues, combing expert-judgements based on text analysis with self-placement of parties. In this method, calibrations of parties on issues are transparently linked to official party documentation and are subject to authorisation by the parties themselves, generating reliable databases of party positions that can be used to construct online applications that help voters to decide which party is closest to their own political preferences. This paper also reflects on methodologies used by VAA developers to identify salient issues and discusses how these issues are reframed into statements to which users of these online tools are asked to respond, as well as how relevant party documentation is identified and how these textual sources are used to calibrate political parties on the issues. Finally, the paper outlines some of the methodological problems that occur when scientists seek to aggregate voters’ opinions into an easy-to-understand output representing their position in a political landscape relative to the policy positions of competing parties.

In this paper, we study the role of law for squaring democracy with a market-based financial order. We approach this issue on the basis of Jürgen Habermas’ discourse theoretical understanding of the role of law in the welfare state. Accordingly, law needs to be enforceable; law-making and law- application need to be institutionally separated; and public law needs to be distinguishable from private law. The contemporary practice of sovereign debt restructuring reveals some empirical and normative challenges to this understanding of the law. These findings inform our proposals for conceptual and institutional improvements that might lead to a more harmonious relation between democracy and financial order. In particular, we argue that a discourse theoretical understanding should tap on the legitimating potential of existing transnational discourses that are characterized by cross-border cleavages in public discourse.

Table of contents:

Dušan Spasojević
SOCIO- STRUCTURAL PARADIGM IN POLITICAL SCIENCE

Kevin Deegan Krause
FULL AND PARTIAL CLEAVAGES IN POST-COMMUNIST SOCIETIES

Zoran Stojiljković, Đorđe Vuković
SOCIAL CLEAVAGES AND POLITICAL ARENA – SERBIAN CASE

Slobodan Cvejić
STRATIFICATIONAL PATTERN OF THE STATE CENTERED CAPITALISM IN SERBIA

Slaviša Orlović
SOCIAL CLEAVAGES AND THEIR INFLUENCE IN SERBIA

Bojan Todosijević, Zoran Pavlović, Olivera Komar
EDUCATION, IDEOLOGY AND POLITICS: THE IMPORTANCE OF THE DIFFERENCES
IN EDUCATIONAL LEVELS FOR THE POLITICAL CLEAVAGES IN SERBIA AND MONTENEGRO

Jasminka Dulić
CONSERVATIVE ORIENTATIONS AND PARTY PREFERENCES