Regimes or Configurations? Boundary Cases in Cross-National Social Cohesion

Cross-national typologies of social cohesion identify groups of countries that achieve cohesion through similar combinations of mechanisms—generalized trust, institutional confidence, civic membership, or shared norms. The dominant approach treats regime membership as deterministic, hiding exactly the cases most informative for typology: countries whose attitudinal profiles combine features of multiple regimes, that are transitioning between configurations, or whose attitudes have decoupled from their broader societal outcomes. Using the Joint EVS/WVS Wave 7 dataset covering 92 countries, this paper develops a probabilistic typology of cohesion and tests whether it can identify substantively distinct boundary cases. Two discreteness tests show that cohesion space is continuous rather than discretely multimodal, justifying probabilistic representation. A four-configuration partition of that space is externally validated against eleven country-level outcomes from five methodologically independent sources, explaining between 29 and 50 percent of cross-national variance. The eight countries with the lowest classification margins are then analyzed against the same outcomes. The boundary-case analysis reveals three distinct patterns: hybrid cases, where attitudinal intermediacy corresponds to intermediate institutional outcomes; institutional decoupling, where attitudes lag or persist beyond political transitions; and structural decoupling, where attitudes and political institutions correspond but structural conditions of inequality and violence diverge.