Title: Polarisation, institutional quality, and social cohesion: evidence in worldwide scenario

Authors: Muhammad Nadeem; Mumtaz Anwar; Zahid Pervaiz

Addresses: Divisions of Management and Administrative Science, Department of Economics, University of Education, Vehari Campus, Pakistan ' School of Economics, University of the Punjab, Pakistan ' Department of Economics, National College of Business Administration and Economics, Pakistan

Abstract: The current study is an effort to investigate the impact of legal institutional quality on social cohesion in the presence of polarisation by using panel data. The results of the study indicate that legal institutions help to nurture social cohesion. Polarisation is a threat to social cohesion and this threat is more when there is the coexistence of low legal institutional quality and high polarisation. To check the impact of coexistence of legal institutional quality and polarisation on social cohesion, an interaction term has been used. The results of the interactive term indicate that in the presence of better-quality legal institutions, the negative effects of polarisation are vanished. Income inequality and globalisation are also found bad for social cohesion. Gender equality, per capita income level, enhance the level of social cohesion in a society. There is a need to develop high-quality legal institutions to enhance the level of social cohesion.

Keywords: polarisation; institutional quality; social cohesion; income inequality; globalisation; gender equality; per capita income; panel data; Hausman test; fixed-effect model.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCEE.2023.132137

International Journal of Computational Economics and Econometrics, 2023 Vol.13 No.3, pp.256 - 269

Received: 17 Nov 2020
Accepted: 28 Oct 2021
Published online: 12 Jul 2023 *

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