Cleavage (politics)


In political science and sociology, a cleavage is a historically determined social or cultural line which divides citizens within a society into groups with differing political interests, resulting in political conflict among these groups. Social or cultural cleavages thus become political cleavages once they get politicized as such. Cleavage theory accordingly argues that political cleavages predominantly determine a country's party system as well as the individual voting behavior of citizens, dividing them into voting blocs. It is distinct from other common political theories on voting behavior in the sense that it focuses on aggregate and structural patterns instead of individual voting behaviors.
Classical cleavage theories have generally been focused on the persistence of dominant conflicts within national political systems over the course of history. Political sociologists Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan for example used the term in their often cited essay on cleavage structures in West European politics. In their essay, the authors argue how the European party systems at their time of writing were still largely based on the social and cultural cleavages that characterized European societies a century earlier. They therefore argue that these 'frozen party systems' can be seen as political expressions of historically determined societal divisions.
Although some authors have claimed that the cleavages in Lipset and Rokkan's theory are still dominant for contemporary voting behaviors in Western Europe, others have argued that these traditional cleavages have become less important and new conflict lines have emerged. Conflicts that have emerged around several new political cleavages are for example cultural, such as conflicts over integration and multiculturalism, or environmental, such as ongoing politics over climate change.

Frozen party systems

The cleavages in Lipset and Rokkan's classical theory have its origins in two developments in 19th century Western Europe. On the one hand European societies at the time saw a period of so-called national revolutions. These events were revolutionary as the centralized state came to take over political roles that had formerly been assigned to decentralized and/or religious communities. According to Lipset and Rokkan, these historical national revolutions gave rise to the following two societal and political cleavages:
On the other hand, the authors claim that the Industrial Revolution also generated two persistent cleavages:
Lipset and Rokkan claim that the political parties that emerged in Western Europe during the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century were formed on the base of these structural cleavages in societies. At the time of writing their essay, they moreover observed that these party systems had for the biggest part not changed. Parties then still seemed to be based on the aforementioned four cleavages, making many European party systems seem 'frozen'. The main explanation they give for this is that with the development of labor parties as well as the introduction of universal suffrage at the beginning of the 20th century all groups of civil society were in a way represented in the political arenas of these states.
There have been noteworthy exceptions to Lipset and Rokkan's theory of Western European party systems, however. As the authors claim, the fascist or national-socialist authoritarian politics of for example Spain, Italy and Germany were not based on these historical cleavages. Thus, not all Western European states had had 'frozen party systems' for the period concerned.

New cleavages

From the 1960's onwards the party systems discussed in Lipset and Rokkan's theory partially 'unfroze' as the traditional cleavages seemed to become less deterministic for voting behaviors than before. The importance of the religious cleavage, for example, has significantly declined because of widespread secularization. Some authors argue that from this period onwards cleavages have therefore lost their overall importance for political outcomes, as particularization and individualization of voters supposedly caused the decline in overall political party identification and group formation. In political science, this is termed dealignment. Other scholars, however, have argued that new cleavages have replaced the traditional ones and have become determinants for political outcomes, emphasizing the persisting value of cleavage theory for political science and sociology. As argued by several scholars, the following new political cleavages have seemed to gain importance in the late 20th and early 21st century:
In some 21st century Western European countries like Austria, Denmark, Norway and Switzerland, a new cultural divide is suggested to have arisen, challenging the old primary political cleavage over economic conflicts. This transformation has occurred since the late 1960s, with the New Left that arose in this period espousing libertarian and universalistic values, and a populist right reaction arising from the 1980s espousing traditionalist and communitarian ones. This is known as Populism and many examples from the 2020s can be highlighted: the election of several populist presidents and parties, the vote of citizens. This can be explained by the rise of the influence of values upon voting behavior. Citizens don't only take into account economics parameters, but also cultural ones.
This new trend, the Authoritarian-Libertarian cleavage, is, slowly, replacing the former Western-countries political cleavage which is the Left-Right fight.