What are cleavages?
= there is some division in society in which some people have different interests than others
- e.g. gender, age, religion, sexual orientation, geography, language, class, values
- many cleavages are not (strongly) politicized, meaning they remain dormant (e.g. age, gender)
politicized = when people try to get votes, to represent certain interest etc.
main questions = which cleavages become politically salient? why do some become foundational for parties and other don’t?
4 types of major cleavages
= Lipset and Rokkan
- owner vs worker
- church vs state
- urban vs rural
- centre vs periphery (mostly after falling SU, one of the strongest cleavages we see today)
overlapping vs cross-cutting cleavages
overlapping cleavages:
- most risky in society: inability to make policy, wider conflict, more polarization
- you have interests that are different from other groups (everything between people divides them)
- e.g. Northern Ireland: center-peripherhy + protestant-catholic -> violence
cross-cutting cleavages:
- different interests groups allign on different issues
- if people have multiple cleavages, they have different alliances, it helps build ties
- e.g. Belgium: regional conflict Flamish vs French speaking + but can allign on economic issues (econ parties/interests allign across the borders of other cleavages)
- shows that some cleavages can become more salient
Europe: two revolutions
*importance + sequence revos differs per country
- National/French revolution -> center-periphery (state.nation-building policy) + church-state (secularism)
- industrial revolution -> class (industrial vs labor, new poverty, urban class with no voting rights) + urban-rural
class cleavage most dominant in Europe
secularism kinda resolved, but still discussion in how far secularism would go (e.g. in education)
Centre-periphery cleavage
reaction to political centralization conflict between more powerful center and weaker periphery, conflict about autonomy, originates in France (national revo)
outcomes:
- secession: Eritrea, Ireland, Pakistan, Slovakia
- substate autonomy / federalism: Belgium, India, Nigeria
- effective absorption into unitary state: France, Italy
- persistent tension: Spain, UK
*often quasi-federalism: not in constitution, but regional gets power
religious cleavage
french/national revolution
- conflict between new elites and the clergy (religious rights and the role of religion in public life)
- can also refer to conflict between different religious dominations
laid basis for christian inspired parties vs liberal parties
e.g. in UK
class cleavage
= industrial revo
- owners of capital + established elite vs working class
- conflict about eco conditions, political rights and redistribution
- strength cleavage depend on perceived opportunities of mobility (e.g. US)
present in virtually all democracies: socialist parties
more and more about rich vs poor rather than owner/worker
rural-urban cleavage
= industrial revo
- landed aristocracy (old money) vs new industrialists (new money)
- positions in the state and power
- less elitist cleavage will present in Nordic countries: eco differences
- revival as reaction to the Green movement
BBB: farmers movement with electoral success, can be explained as countermove to growing Green movement = rural-urban re-emerging
new cleavages?
after Lipset and Rokkan: silent revolutions (non-economic issues) + transnational cleavage
cleavages and ideologies
cleavages -> parties, all parties have ideologies (?!)
parties are the institutions that facilitate the expression of cleavages
ideology = collection of beliefs and values
- of how we should deal with issues (e.g. cleavages)
common heuristic = left and right (originates in France: for monarchy set on the right, against the monarchy set on the left)
*in the US liberal parties are left wing, elsewhere they are right wing
!horseshoe model: both the -isms (left and rightwing ideologies) can be extreme and lead to totalitarian regimes
freezing hypothesis
Lipset & Rokkan: same parties and programs around for a long time: 1960s resemble the 1920s
why?
Strengthening party alignment
- pillarization/verzuiling e.g.
- parties became big in society, associated with labor unions, associations, etc. bringing people closer to parties
parties as ‘political entrepreneurs’
- parties based on societal cleavages but also sustain these cleavages as political entrepreneurs
- once in power, keep telling people how important the cleavage is, saying you have to vote for me, otherwise….
- discourse keeps the salient cleavage alive to keep votes
manipulation of electoral rules (through mass suffrage eventually implemented)
- duverger law: majority system leads to a two-party system
influence of electoral systems
majority and plurality systems limit the amount of cleavages that can be represented
changes since Lipset and Rokkan
Silent Revolution (Inglehart): people born after WW2 were less concerned with material stuff, more on post-material stuff as human rights, democracy, environment
- incorporation by existing parties + new parties
- postmaterialist values mostly with richer + younger voters
- UK??
- emergence of New Left, Social Liberal and Green parties
Transnational cleavage: winners vs losers globalization + pro-immigration vs against
- new parties emerge (e.g. in France and Italy, partly bc mainstream parties reacted slowly)
- parties redefine their programs around this (e.g. in UK, US)
focus on:
- immigration and multiculturalism
- globalization and nationalism
- culture and identity
- majoritarian vs. liberal democracy
- climate change (?) Covid-19 (?)
changes -> new conceptualization left-right: economic left and right but also cultural left and right
transformation of cleavages
Freezing hypothesis:
- allignment: party identification on the basis of cleavage structure and ideologies
Recent decades:
- realignment = shifting party identification on the basis of changing cleavages, resulting in (dramatic) changes in party system = growing electoral volatility
- dealignment = declining party identification that is not replaced with a new one (-> not voting) = decreasing turnout
people vote too much, see too little influence
generational change?
electoral volatility = Pederson index: party vote change from one party to the next
new democracies - most common cleavage
identity/ethnic cleavages
- associated strongly with African parties
- is not very different from center-periphery, cultural cleavages
- roots of political saliency ethnicity?
((ethnic cleavage often overlaps with language, center-periphery, religious cleavages) notes by Iago)
new democracies
Eastern Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin-America
cleavages can explain party systems in new democracies, but its diff types of cleavages (different revolutions)
why diff cleavages?
- no large scale internal process of state formation
- no contestation for suffrage rights (exc: South Africa) : all came around the same time
- greater role for individual politicians due to absence of strong social organizations
results:
- high electoral volatility (new parties emerge, but don’t necessarily stick around)
- personalistic politics
- ethnic parties
- valence programs + clientelistic politics
valence program = something that no one can be against: less poverty, corruption etc.
ideology not necessarily absent, e.g. communist parties still always go for bigger role state
new democracies: colonial and post-colonial dynamics
more groups than states
lack of nation-building?
colonialism put people together without binding them together as a nation -> independence led to return individual identities
active policies against nationbuilding, heigthening ethnic divides
- e.g. Belgian colonial rule in Rwanda and Burundi influenced by social science theories of racial classifications: Tutsi minority trained in French and governing + Hutu majority (“short, stubby, smiling fools”) seen as future farmers
colonial rule = prevention cross-cutting cleavages: only cultural associations allowed under colonial rule, narrow bases early political mobilization
- people could only organize for independence with people from their own ethnic group
-> Congo independence -> 250 parties (each ethnic group wanted own party)
-> Ghana: formation political parties already allowed before independence -> parties with multiple ethnic groups
new democracies: authoritarian rule
leaders claimed to fight for ‘nationalism’ but held on to power + advantaged their own group (-> civil wars)
- Tanzania exception: leader chose national language that was not association with a specific ethnic group
Stewart: horizontal inequalities, a neglected dimension of development
- inequality based on cultural group status
- rich tend to belong to one political group, the poor to another
- is different from vertical inequality like GINI: one group could be small percentage population and large amount money, one group could be smal percentage population with large % money
instability -> no democracies
new democracies - third wave democratization
(re)turn to multiparty democracy in the 90s, return ethnic voting, but variation (e.g. South Africa not always ethnic voting, although now more ethnic nationalism)
new democracies - ethnic parties + clientelism
multi-ethnic / ethnic parties:
- not always clear majority ethnic group, often a coalition of ethnic groups
- not build on a program, but on clientelism and on corruption
- campaigns based on valence issues (better roads, employment etc)
- feeding this = state resources
!unity build not on programs, but on clientelism (if we work together, you can take this ministry, i will take this, and we will distribute resources among ourselves)
mass clientelism = reciprocal relationship between a patron (politician) and client (voter)
- jobs = patronage
- money = vote buying
- permits, loans, food
- juxtaposted to programmatic politics: we want dev. roads, we’ll offer aid, but only if you vote for the right party
elite clientelism = i give you something, you give me something, we won’t bother each other
clientelism seen as problem for democracy: exlcusive nature + use of state resources
horizontal inequality
= inequality based on cultural group status
- rich tend to belong to one political group, the poor to another
- is different from vertical inequality where the whole society is unequal, with horizontal inequality different groups are unequal
(article Lipset and Rokkan) 4 critical lines of cleavage
l-g axis = territorial dimension of national cleavage structure
a-i axis = functional dimension (conflicts cut across the territorial units of the nation)
National Revolution ->
- subject vs dominant culture = conflict between central nation-building culture and increasing resistance of the ethnically/linguistically/religiously distinct subject populations in the provinces and the peripheries
- church vs government = conflict between centralizing, standardizing, mobilizing nation-state and the historically established corporate privileges of the church
Industrial Revolution ->
- primary vs secondary economy = conflict between landed interests and the rising class of industrial entrepreneurs
- workers vs employers/owners
(article Lipset and Rokkan) - thresholds for cleavages to become politically salient
thresholds in the path of any movement pressing forward new sets of demands within a political system
- legitimation (is the protest recognized the right of petition, criticism and opposition)
- incorporation (do participants have political citizenship?)
- representation (must it join older movements to get access to representative organs or can it gain representation on its own)
- majority power (built-in checks and counterforces against numerical majority rule vs victory at the polls give party/alliance power to bring major structural changes)
(article Bornschier - cleavages in old and new democracies) = problem with freezing hypothesis
1980s new value conflicts
mobilization new actors means that the links between social groups and parties of the established structure of conflict must have weakened
dealignment = social groups abandon the party they supported = the weakening of the established structure of conflict
- structural = long term evolution of social structure weakens the grip of the established cleavages (e.g. post-industrial econ. -> shrinking traditional working class)
- behavioral = links between social groups and ideological party blocks formed by cleavages change bc old conflicts are pacified or new divisions are strong enough to disrupt the prevalent patterns of conflict
(parties can take up positions on new issues, but their supporters are often divided on it -> party doesn’t pick a side)
realignment = the process of forging new links between parties and social groups
