Data and Methods:

The study of cleavages can benefit significantly from striking improvements in recent decades in the emergence of new data archives (frequent, cross-national mass-level surveys, elite-actor surveys, academic-expert surveys, content analysis of party and media documents, and deeply-disaggregated electoral and census data) and new methods for analyzing this data (particularly especially ecological analysis, various multinomial techniques and new qualitative methods). We invite papers that use these new data and techniques to measure the strength and borders of cleavages or the congruence of political “sides” at various levels including coalition patterns, sympathy among partisan elites and supporters, ideological similarities and social similarities.