Cross-cutting cleavage

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. While the concept may have been around since antiquity the formalizing of it originated with James Madison in The Federalist, Number 10. Robert A. Dahl built a theory of Pluralist democracy which is a direct descendant of Madison's cross-cutting cleavages. The term's antonym is reinforcing cleavages", which would be the case of one of the ethnic groups being all rich and the other all poor. The term originates from Simmel (1908) in his work Soziologie.