Social Cohesion: A New Definition and a Proposal for Its Measurement in Africa

Social cohesion is crucial to increasing societies’ resilience to shocks and to enabling sustainable futures. Amidst growing tensions and polarization in all world regions, social cohesion ranks high on the agendas of researchers, decision-makers and international organizations. Despite the strong interest in the topic, there are major constraints to understanding its patterns, causes and effects: the lack of a common conceptualization and measurement of social cohesion. This paper contributes to filling these research gaps in three ways. First, it provides a narrow and operationalizable definition of social cohesion, which is well rooted in the long-standing literature in the social sciences and travels across world regions. According to this definition, social cohesion encompasses three main attributes: inclusive identity, trust and cooperation for the common good. All these attributes operate in a horizontal and a vertical dimension. Second, it proposes a measurement of social cohesion in Africa, relaying on household data from the Afrobarometer surveys and expert data from the V-Dem database. Third, it applies our indicators and provides empirical evidence that social cohesion varies across countries and within countries over time, and shows that overall social cohesion cannot be reduced to just one of such indicators. Our empirical analyses do not only mark the presence of four different constellations of social cohesion in Africa but the overall approach we take provides a first step towards measuring social cohesion at the global level.