Models of Political Conflict and Stability

摘要

Whether analyzing the stability of democracy or the possibility for regime change, politics is fundamentally structured by divisions of societies into factional conflicts. To better model the scope of these conflicts, this study reexamines how partitions and dimensionality determine structural stability. The multitude of possible divisions suggest that a method of finite differences provides a model for analyzing the problem of factions in the form of reinforcing and crosscutting cleavages. This not only provides a method, but a technically precise definition of cleavages as partitions with a dimensionality. As the findings in this study indicate, the sizes of the factions are determined generally by the number of partitions. The greater the number of partitions, the greater the number of groups and the more differentially sized the factions, with variance in the fairness of the division a measure of both the number and type of political cleavages.