Composition of Religious and Ethnic Groups (CREG) Project

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Composition of Religious and Ethnic Groups (CREG) Project

To compliment the SPEED project and the study of conflict events, the Composition of Religious and Ethnic Groups Project (CREG) was started to create a set of time-varying measures that gauge the nature and depth of country-specific socio-cultural cleavages. It focused on 165 of the largest countries in the world (all countries with a population above 500,000 in 2004) during the post-WWII era to create country-specific projections on the relative sizes of the different groups during the postwar era. 

 

Ethnic Fractionalization
Ethnic Group Fractionalization Map, Based on CREG Data

 

The Composition of Religious and Ethnic Groups (CREG) Project - The Composition of Religious and Ethnic Groups (CREG) project is a large-scale effort initiated by the Cline Center as part of its Societal Infrastructures and Development (SID) project. Its objective is to fill an important void in the field of comparative politics by creating a set of time-varying measures that gauge the nature and depth of country-specific socio-cultural cleavages. It focuses on 165 of the largest countries in the world (all countries with a population above 500,000 in 2004) during the post-WWII era. The data-gathering phase has two main components. The first deals with the collection of population data for the principal ethnic and religious groups in a country; it uses these data to create a set of country-specific projections on the relative sizes of the different groups during the postwar era. The second component involves collecting survey data from country and regional experts on: (1) various physical, cultural and ascribed differences between the groups; and (2) country-specific factors that ameliorate/ aggravate inter-group differences (e.g., crosscutting organizational memberships; dyadic relationships within social, economic, legal and political domains that reflect power differentials). The following paper provides details on each component.

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