Revisiting the Measurement of Polarization

Abstract

We revisit Esteban and Ray's (1994) seminal model of polarization. Their main result (unnecessarily) relies on the assumption that individuals are infinitely divisible, which imposes strong restrictions on admissible polarization indices. We show that relaxing this assumption yields a broader family of indices consistent with the original axioms. The resulting indices avoid counter-intuitive rankings that arise when using results on the original paper and provide greater flexibility for empirical applications.