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Measuring Social Polarization with Ordinal and Categorical Data
Author(s) -
PERMANYER IÑAKI,
D'AMBROSIO CONCHITA
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
journal of public economic theory
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.809
H-Index - 32
eISSN - 1467-9779
pISSN - 1097-3923
DOI - 10.1111/jpet.12093
Subject(s) - categorical variable , ordinal data , salient , polarization (electrochemistry) , partition (number theory) , ethnic group , econometrics , sociology , economics , mathematics , statistics , computer science , artificial intelligence , combinatorics , anthropology , chemistry
We examine the measurement of social polarization with categorical and ordinal data. We partition the society into groups on the basis of salient social characteristics, such as race and ethnicity, and we take into account the extent to which these groups are clustered in certain regions of an attribute's distribution. This is particularly useful in many contexts where cardinal data are not available. The new measures we propose are characterized axiomatically.