Polarisation, Institutional Quality, and Social Cohesion: Evidence in Worldwide Scenario

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.