Models and techniques on how to measure pluralism and diversity.
Pluralism is a central but elusive contemporary value. Pluralism is the belief that diversity is beneficial to society. Most of us would agree, but what does diversity exactly mean? How to measure it and tell whether a society is more or less diverse?
Cultural pluralism, political pluralism and value pluralism all have slightly different meanings, but they all share the belief that coexistence of diverse opinions, ways of life and value systems is enriching for all members of a society.
What makes pluralism such a hard topic to study is that it deals with human values (usually the focus of pluralism) and sociocultural identities (often referred as diversity) that are incommensurate. It will never be possible to objectively compare, let alone quantify, what makes people different, to determine which of sex, gender, ethnicity, religious belief or political conviction contributes more to a diverse society.
Does it mean we should stop trying to measure diversity? On the contrary! What we need is a "meta-pluralistic" approach: many measures examining pluralism and diversity from various aspects. The more pluralistic measures we gather, the more they will make us think and say something meaningful about the level of diversity in a society.
The aim of this open source repository is to gather models, techniques and use cases on how to measure pluralism and diversity, so that they could be reused and expanded.
Please feel free to contribute, share your own analysis, add comments and links in the reference section.
License
The content of this project is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), and the underlying source code is licensed under GPL-3.0 License.
- The World of Indicators: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/world-of-indicators/C7903E69E0329A256EF02C3CB5C918ED
- Liberty (Incorporating Four Essays on Liberty) by Isaiah Berlin: https://www.amazon.com/Four-Essays-Liberty-Isaiah-Berlin/dp/0192810340
- Measuring Cultural and Ethnic Diversity: http://csi.nuff.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Measuring-ethnic-and-cultural-affiliation-20200609.pdf
- What is the Point of Equality? (Elizabeth S. Anderson): https://www.philosophy.rutgers.edu/joomlatools-files/docman-files/4ElizabethAnderson.pdf
- The Human Value Scale: https://www.europeansocialsurvey.org/docs/findings/ESS_Findings_HVS.pdf