The concept of preference structuration not only provides possible escape-routes for social-choice-theoretic impossibility problems, but also points towards ways of formalizing notions of pluralism, consensus and issue-dimensionality. The present note introduces two methods of (operationally) measuring preference structuration, giving attention to both their conceptual characteristics and other computational feasibility. The method to be advocated, called the fractionalization approach, combines well-known social-choice-theoretic criteria of preference structuration (such as single-peakedness or value-restriction) with the frequently used Rae-Taylor (1970) and Laakso-Taagepera (1979) approaches towards measuring the level of fractionalization, and the effective number of components, in a system.
