Modernization, Social Cleavage, and Political Integration

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between political integration and social cleavage structure. It reviews major theoretical perspectives and then suggests a modified explanation of social cleavage and its political implications. This study finds that regionalized social cleavage is responsible for such historical events as internal wars and separations, which are an extreme form of political disintegration. By applying the pooled cross-section time-series design to longitudinal data, it also finds that the major factors of political disintegration are regionalized cleavage, minority rule, and political discrimination. In addition, economic growth clearly interacts with the regional patterns of social cleavage. This paper has several implications for future studies. Studies of political integration should explicitly take into account the regional patterns of social cleavage. Regionalized cleavage not only affects integration directly, but it also interacts with other factors. Therefore, future studies should not assume that many factors mentioned in literature would have an additive effect.