In social sciences, a cross-cutting cleavage exists when groups on one cleavage overlap among groups on another cleavage. "Cleavages" may include racial, political, and religious divisions in society. Formally, members of a group j on a given cleavage x belong to groups on a second cleavage y with members of other groups k, l, m, etc. from the first cleavage x. For example, if a society contained two ethnic groups that had equal proportions of rich and poor it would be cross-cutting. Robert A. Dahl built a theory of Pluralist democracy which is a direct descendant of Madison's cross-cutting cleavages.^[1] Cross-cutting cleavages are contrasted with reinforcing cleavage (e.g. a situation where one ethnic group is all-rich and the other is all-poor). The term originates from Simmel (1908) in his work Soziologie.^[2]

In social sciences, a cross-cutting cleavage exists when groups on one cleavage overlap among groups on another cleavage. "Cleavages" may include racial, political, religious divisions in society. Formally, members of a group j on a given cleavage x belong to groups on a second cleavage y with members of other groups k, l, m, etc. from the first cleavage x. For example, if a society contained two ethnic groups that had equal proportions of rich and poor it would be cross-cutting.^{[citation needed]}

Cross-cutting cleavages are perhaps most heavily referenced in political philosophy. James Madison's commentary on the concept in Federalist No. 10 contributed substantially to the development of the idea of cross-cutting cleavages.^[3][4] Madison argued the fractious nature of factions would be a mechanism for political stability and prevent a tyranny of the majority. Because no group can align all members along a single cleavage, they will instead be forced to build a broad base of support by seeking the approval of many different factions, preventing a simple "majority dictatorship" where one group making up a bare majority could (for example) expropriate all the property of another group.

An in-depth discussion of this process is given by Seymour Martin Lipset in his 1960 book Political Man.^{[citation needed]}

Cross-cutting theory was applied to such topics as social order, political violence, voting behaviour, political organization and democratic stability, for example Truman's The Governmental Process, Dahl's A Preface to Democratic Theory, among others.^{[citation needed]} Around the same^[which?] time, several scholars (including Lipset himself) suggested ways to measure the concept, the best-known being Rae and Taylor's in their 1970 book The Analysis of Political Cleavages. Due to data limitations, these theories were generally left untested for a couple of decades.^{[citation needed]}

The term originates from Simmel (1908) in his work Soziologie.^{[5][page needed]} Anthropologists used the term heavily in the first few decades of the 20th century, as they brought back descriptions of non-Western societies throughout Asia and Africa.^[6][7][8][9] Peter Blau's work further refined the idea.^[10]

Stein Rokkan wrote a classic essay on cross-cutting cleavages in Norway.^[11][12]

Diana Mutz revived the concept in the early 2000s, looking at political participation and democratic theory using survey data in the US and other Western European democracies.^[13][14]

Several scholars have written on how cross-cutting cleavages relates to ethnic voting,^[15] civil war,^[16] and ethnic censuses.^[17]

In 2011, Selway suggested a new measure relevant to economic growth for crosscutting cleavages and published a crossnational dataset on crosscutting cleavages among several dimensions (ethnicity, class, geography and religion).^[18]

Desmet, Ortuño-Ortín and Wacziarg (2017), in the American Economic Review, derive and discuss several measures of cross-cuttingness and compute them using data on ethnic identity and cultural values.^[19]

• Federalist No. 10
• Cleavage (politics)
• Intersectionality
• Wedge issue