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Summary Articles Politics and society in comparative perspective
A summary of all the articles that have been discussed during the course Politics and society in comparative perspective
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The transformation of cleavage politics The 1997 Stein Rokkan lecture(article 1)
Rokkan’s basic argument about the conflict structures in Western European societies and
their translation into party systems was to link the configurations of contemporary European
party systems to the social and cultural divisions which marked European societies at the
time of the formation of the party systems in the second half of the 19th century.
The question of the development of the Western European conflict structure and its
translation into politics has been studied by a variety of authors and can be split up in the
following categories:
1. According to Bartolini and Mair (1990), who have studied the long-term development
of the class cleavage in particular, the freezing hypothesis, albeit in a somewhat
modified version, still applies.
2. Franklin, Mackie, Valen and their collaborators (1992), claim that in almost all of the
countries they studied an important decline in the ability of social divisions to
structure individual voting choice has taken place. They suggest that there is a
universal process of decline in cleavage politics, which has gone more or less far in
the different Western European and Northern American countries. Moreover, Franklin
(1992: 886) maintains that the decline in the structuring capacities of traditional
cleavages is nowhere balanced by increases in the structuring properties of new
cleavages. The origins of this long drawn out process of decline are, according to this
group of researchers, to be sought in the successful resolution of the social conflicts
which had been embodied in the traditional cleavages.
3. A third group of authors – the proponents of the ‘new politics’ approach – share the
idea that traditional cleavages are weakening, but they suggest that the declining
political significance of religion and class is accompanied by the emergence of a new
cleavage. More specifically, they believe that there is a new ‘value cleavage’ rooted
in the opposition between materialist and postmaterialist orientations.
‘Cleavages’ have, of course, a structural basis in a division between opposite social groups.
But the notion of a ‘cleavage’ cannot be reduced to structural terms. It includes two more
elements:1 the groups involved must be conscious of their collective identity – as workers,
employers, catholics or protestants – and be willing to act on that basis. Moreover, a
cleavage must be expressed in organizational terms. In other words, a structural division is
transformed into a cleavage, if a political actor gives coherence and organized political
expression to what otherwise are inchoate and fragmentary beliefs, values and experiences
among members of some social group. Conceptualized in these terms, the notion of
‘cleavage’ constitutes an antidote to any kind of psychological or sociological reductionism
which treats politics as a mere reflection of underlying social, cultural or psychological
processes. It implies that social divisions are not translated into politics as a matter of
course, but that they are decisively shaped by their political articulation.
Following WW2 a big class change in the middle class can be observed: Along
neo-Weberian lines, Goldthorpe has defined the new middle class as a service class.
,The paper argues that “class cannot be the only structural basis for the ‘value cleavage’.”
Inglehart has suggested another one: generational experience. He has shown that
successive generations turn out to be ever more post-materialist and that the generational
differences in value orientations are stable over time. Following Inglehart, we may explain
this generational shift in the value orientations by the general increase in the level of
affluence in the Western democracies.
Class and generation are two structural elements associated with the tremendous change
in value orientations that has occurred over the postwar period. In Switzerland, religion is
another one. In this country, believing catholics in particular are still rather resistant to the
transformation of their values and its political implications. The rural-urban cleavage also
has some impact on the value change and its political consequences, given that the process
develops more slowly in the Swiss countryside. But even taken together, these four
structural aspects are by no means sufficient to account for the impact of values. Moreover,
the political socialization in one’s family of origin – operationalized by one’s father’s political
choice,10 or at school – indicated by one’s educational level, are not able to account for the
profound consequences of value orientations on left voting either. Rather than conclude that
structure and values have by now come to be largely disconnected, I would tentatively
suggest that we have not yet been able to identify the structural correlates of the ‘value
cleavage’ in a sufficient way. The conceptualization of the transformation of contemporary
Western European societies needs to be further pursued.
The Changing Cleavage Politics of Western Europe (article 2)
In their classic account of the formation of party systems in Western Europe, Lipset &
Rokkan argued that long-standing social conflicts predating the emergence of the mass
franchise helped to structure political competition once universal suffrage was introduced in
Europe. Specifically, processes of nation building and industrialization had generated four
major divides, or cleavages, which structured subsequent political conflict: center–periphery
(territorial), religious– secular (church versus state), urban–rural, and labor–capital. The
“National Revolution” led to a center–periphery conflict between the national culture and
subordinate ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups, often located in peripheral areas. It also
led to church– state tension, as the state grew and the church sought to protect its historic
powers. Following this, the Industrial Revolution first gave rise to an urban–rural conflict
between the traditional landed elite and new bourgeois industrialist class, and subsequently
to conflict between workers and capitalists—underpinning the development of the labor
movement and left parties.
Lipset & Rokkan did not offer a clear definition of political cleavages, but subsequent
researchers have advanced a three-part formula. The first is social-structural—cleavages
exist between large social groups with conflicting interests. The second is
psychological—cleavages involve the perception of distinct group identities, ideological
values, and interests among group members. The third is organizational—the mobilization of
these identities, loyalties, and values by political parties, who then structure and
institutionalize the political conflicts arising between groups (Bartolini & Mair 1990, p. 215).
All cleavage politics is therefore, at least in part, identity politics, since stable cleavages
,depend on groups with stable and shared identities that are organized into politics by parties.
A crucial set of observations by Lipset & Rokkan (1967, p. 6) was that only a few salient
conflicts would polarize a political system, that some cleavages would prove more important
than others, and that these cleavage structures would “also tend to undergo changes over
time.”
We have identified four key socio-demographic developments that are contributing to the
emergence of new cleavages in European democracies. First, educational expansion has
driven the growth of a mass graduate class and the corresponding decline of school leavers
with few educational qualifications, who were often employed in manual and unskilled
occupations. A second important development is mass migration and the growing ethnic
diversity of European electorates. Third, the aging of societies contributes to deepening
generational divides—both in terms of other demographic characteristics (such as
education) and political values and identities. Fourth is the growing geographical polarization
of populations between prospering major cities and declining towns and rural areas. While
the rise of new parties and the fragmentation of party systems reflect the strategic
mobilization of electorates in an era of instability and volatility, these long-term changes in
European societies are fundamental to understanding political change.
Ideologically Illogical? Why Do the Lower-Educated Dutch Display so
Little Value Coherence? (article 3)
Knowing someone’s values on economic matters does not lead to a correct prediction of
what one will think about cultural matters. There is no or very little coherence between the
two value dimensions. Yet, research clearly demonstrates that there are important
differences in value coherence between social strata. Studies have shown that compared to
the masses, there is more value coherence among political elites. Studies among religious
specialists, cultural elites, lawyers and intellectual elites all come to the same conclusion:
more value coherence exists among elites. In the case of these elite groups, egalitarian
values on the economic domain coherently go together with libertarian ones on the cultural
domain, while laissez-faire values on the former “logically'' go together with authoritarian
ones on the latter. Among elites, political values are more consistently ordered into a single
dimension of progressiveness vs. conservatism.
Converse objects to the assumption that the public at large (the mass), like society’s upper
layer (the elite), integrates political values into a single ideological dimension that ranges
from conservative to progressive. Such ideological one-dimensionality or value coherence –
Converse uses ideological constraint – is only characteristic of the elite. According to
Converse, the assumption that these ”constraints visible at the elite level are mirrored in the
mass public…” is untenable, because the public at large combines conservative values
about certain issues with progressive ones about others. Hence, for the lower educated an
image of ideological fragmentation emerges, while the higher educated feature high levels of
ideological coherence: “Ideologically constrained belief systems are… more common in
upper than in lower social strata.”
Hypothesis 1 of the paper: while for the public at large there is no coherence between
egalitarian and authoritarian values, the degree to which these values are organized
, coherently increases with educational level. -> the hypothesis focuses on political
competence for explaining differences in ideological coherence.
The second hypothesis is that value incoherence among the lower educated is caused by
their low level of political competence.
The ideological profile of the lower educated, in short, is indeed incoherent, as Lipset argued
a long time ago: because of their economically insecure position they are egalitarian and
because of their culturally insecure position they are authoritarian at the same time. Although
the higher educated prefer laissez-faire economic values and libertarian cultural ones, an
important, but rarely noted, observation is that differences between the higher and lower
educated in authoritarianism are greater than in egalitarianism. The fact that the higher
educated hold stronger libertarian views pertaining to cultural issues, but barely hold
laissez-faire values pertaining to economic matters, suggests that economic interests only
lead to egalitarianism when people are in an economically insecure position. We thus expect
that the economic insecurity of the lower educated leads to egalitarian values, but that the
economic security of the higher educated does not lead to laissez-faire values. Following this
logic, the consequences of economic (in)security for economic values differ for the higher
and lower educated, whereas the consequences of cultural insecurity for cultural values are
basically similar. Their culturally insecure position leads the lower educated to authoritarian
values, and their economically insecure position leads them to egalitarianism. Hence, for the
lower educated an incoherent ideological profile emerges. As their culturally secure position
leads the higher educated to libertarian values and their economically secure position does
not lead them to laissez-faire values, a coherent ideological profile is more likely for this
category. The crucial third hypothesis that may be derived from this theory is: ideological
incoherence can mainly be found among the lower educated because they are in an
economically and culturally insecure position.
How people organise cultural attitudes: cultural belief systems and the
populist radical right (article 4)
In line with Lipset’s seminal observations, most scholars agree that political attitudes among
the public, as well as the agendas of political parties, are structured according to these two
dimensions: (1) redistribution issues, and (2) issues pertaining to cultural order and
individual liberty. For attitudes on the latter this assumes that among the public a progressive
stance on one cultural issue goes together with a progressive approach to a broad array of
other cultural issues.
Cultural issues are considered interchangeable’ in studies on the ideological profile of
citizens of Western countries.Such a one-dimensional outlook on cultural issues may be
applicable to large parts of the electorate, but party-level research by Akkerman (2005) and
Betz and Meret (2009) demonstrates that this is strikingly at odds with the agendas of
various contemporary populist radical right parties (PRRPs) in Western Europe.
Whereas such parties grew out of resistance against multicultural-ism and culturally
progressive values, these studies show that various Western European PRRPs currently
combine their well-known culturally conservative agenda regarding immigration and ethnic
minorities with a culturally progres-sive approach to gender issues and sexual minorities.
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