Existing studies on public policy and ethnicity either include only one of the three main non-class cleavages in society - racial (phenotypical), linguistic, religious – or considered them as separate variables. This paper suggests that they should be regarded as different manifestations of one single characteristic of ethnic differentiation. To treat these different ‘ethnic markers’ as separate variables or to employ one to the exclusion of the other regardless of the peculiarities of individual countries, forged especially by their specific historical geography and degree of ethnic intensity, inevitably leads to mismeasurement of the degree of fragmentation. Nevertheless, the inadequacy of such a measure of ethnic fragmentation needs to be recognised not only due to the cross-cutting or mutually reinforcing nature of cleavages, but also to the existence of other non-ethnic social variables that either contribute to the institutional complexity of the social environment in which the ethnic fragmentation functions or by themselves directly affect the degree of ethnic fractionalisation.