Social and Cultural Pluralism as a Concept in Social System Analysis

Abstract

Cultural pluralism as an analytic concept is explored through re-analysis of A Cross Polity Survey data on 114 world polities. An Index of Pluralism is devised, utilizing various measures of cultural differences. Degree of pluralism is found to have a linear relationship with a series of demographic, communication, economic, and political variables. Large geographic size and a thinly scattered and illiterate population are related to pluralism level as a dependent variable, whereas pluralism in turn has consequences for low per capita GNP and political instability. The relationship of pluralism to these structural variables argues for its conceptual value in social system analysis.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 46 citations exist upstream.