New Social Movements In Western Europe

A Comparative Analysis

Kriesi Hanspeter, Ruud Koopmans, Jan Willem Duyvendak, Marco G. Giugni

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136996597
• Subtopic: Political Advocacy

First published in 1996. This study is the product of a collaborative effort that has lasted for more than seven years. This is a project on the comparative analysis of new social movements in Western Europe.

Part I
General Concepts and Basic Results

Chapter 1
National Cleavage Structures

In this chapter we will analyze the way that traditional political cleavage structures facilitate or constrain the action space of new social movements. As already suggested in the Introduction, the new social movements tend to articulate a political conflict that is based on a new cultural and social cleavage in society. Not only in this case, but quite generally, political conflicts are ultimately rooted in structural and cultural cleavages. In other words, they have their origin in broad societal transformations that oppose social groups for structural and cultural reasons. However, “structure” and “culture” do not impinge directly on politics. Social and cultural dividing lines—societal cleavages—only result in political cleavages if they are politicized. As Bartolini and Mair (1990: 216) observe, political cleavages cannot be reduced simply to the outgrowths of social stratification; rather, social distinctions become political cleavages when they are organized as such.¹ If the social-structural basis of a political conflict emerges from social change, the conflict itself results from the coupling of these processes of social change with those of democratization, politicization, and mobilization. Thus, Bartolini and Mair continue, it is only through the historical processes of mobilization, politicization, and democratization that any specific political cleavage acquires its distinctive normative profile and organizational network (ibid.: 217). In short, political cleavages develop initially on the basis of a social stratification that sets the structural conditions for group identity, and only later do they become fully political, particularly with the development of mass democracies. Or, in other words, social change determines structural and cultural potentials for political mobilization that remain latent as long as they are not politicized. In order for such potentials to become politicized, they have to develop, on the one hand, a collective identity, a sense of solidarity, and political consciousness,² and, on the other hand, an organizational infrastructure (Kriesi 1985: 30ff.; Klandermans 1988). The organizational infrastructure includes not only formal organizations, but also informal personal networks that allow for the micromobilization processes to take place that have been found to be so important in the mobilization for collective action.

Traditional societal cleavages constitute the basis of the political cleavage structure even today. Although Western European societies have undergone far-reaching social and cultural transformations, the impact of traditional societal cleavages on the political cleavage structure has proven to be very resistant to social change. Thus, according to the well-known “freezing hypothesis” of Lipset and Rokkan (1967), the political configuration in the party systems of the Western European countries of the late sixties still reflected the cleavage structures that had existed at the end of the First World War. If, in the meantime, the impact of the traditional cleavage structure on the voting behavior of Western European electorates seems to have considerably diminished in most countries (Franklin et al. 1992), the sediments of past political mobilization are still with us.

Given that the political mobilization by new social movements articulates a new societal cleavage, it seems obvious that the continuing strength of old cleavages, which is reflected in the national political conflict structure, has an impact on the possibility for the new cleavage to emerge. While the structural underpinnings of the new cleavage are present in all Western European countries, the relative strength of the old cleavages may be expected to restrict the possibilities of the mobilization on the basis of the new cleavage. The construction of new identities is only possible when old identities fade and lose their capacity to help people to interpret the world. Distinct existing identities provide, in other words, a shield against the framing attempts of rising collective actors. Moreover, the articulation of a new cleavage presupposes the mobilization of resources that may not be available if political mobilization on the basis of traditional cleavages is absorbing a great deal of the time, energy, and money of the relatively small part of the population that engages in political action. Organizations engaged in traditional political conflicts may even actively prevent potential supporters of new social movements from contributing to their mobilization. According to this line of reasoning, there exists a zero-sum relationship between the strength of traditional political cleavages and the possibility of new social movements to articulate a new societal cleavage.

Karl-Werner Brand (1985: 322f.) has already suggested that the mobilization of “new social movements” depends on the mobilization potential of traditional political conflicts. He maintained that there exists an inverse relationship between the mobilization potential of the traditional class conflict and the mobilization opportunities of new social movements. According to his hypothesis, the pacification of traditional class conflict by way of the expansion of the welfare state and by the institutionalization of the conflict over the distribution of the national product created “space” for the articulation of new conflicts. He did not propose the same substitutive relationship between the continued mobilization potential of other traditional conflicts and the mobilization of new social movements. He seemed to assume that, under certain conditions, these other traditional cleavages might serve as a catalyst for the mobilization of the new social movements rather than as a constraining factor.

The Mobilization Potential of a Political Cleavage

In order to get a clearer idea of the possible relationships between the traditional political cleavages and the new ones articulated by the new social movements, let us briefly discuss the concept of the “mobilization potential” of a political cleavage. The term “mobilization potential” was first introduced by Klandermans and Oegema (1987), who referred to the “potential of people in a society who could theoretically be mobilized by a social movement.” Applied to a political cleavage, the term can be defined in an analogous way as the potential of people in the social groups involved in a political cleavage that could theoretically be mobilized by a social movement. In order to characterize the mobilization potentials of various cleavages in a more precise way, we propose to distinguish between two dimensions that we conceptualize by applying some ideas of Bartolini and Mair (1990). First, the mobilization potentials of political cleavages vary according to the degree to which the cleavages constitute social groups that are, at the same time, clearly segmented from each other and internally highly integrated. This dimension corresponds to what Bartolini and Mair call the degree of closure of the social relationship represented by the cleavage. Accordingly, a cleavage is structured by processes that restrict mobility in a number of ways (ibid.: 224): “through marriage, educational institutions, the urban and spatial setting of the population, social customs, religious practices and so on. And, as mass politics develops, these original forms of closure are extended to new kinds of behaviours, such as organizational membership and voting, which may then reinforce the original basis of the cleavage through an active defense of the community.” Social homogeneity and cultural distinctiveness, on the one hand, and internal organizational integration and political encapsulation, on the other, are the parameters determining the degree of closure of social groups divided by a cleavage. The more socially and culturally distinct, and the more internally integrated and politically encapsulated a group, the greater is its degree of closure. Tilly’s (1978) concept of “CATNET” (category + network) captures the same idea of closure of a social group.

This notion of closure is crucial, because, as Oberschall (1973) has argued convincingly, an internally highly integrated group in a segmented context—no matter whether it is integrated on the basis of traditional communal or more modern associational ties—constitutes a formidable basis for political mobilization. The members of a group that is closed in terms of a traditional cleavage will be readily mobilizable on the basis of their distinctiveness—that is, their collective identity and common interests, their loyalty to the group, and their shared consciousness of belonging to a distinct group—and on the basis of their integration into informal networks and formal organizations. However, the essential point in the present context is that they will only be mobilizable in terms of the traditional cleavage that defines their distinctive identity and their specific interests; that is, they will not be available for mobilization by new social movements.

The second aspect of the mobilization potential of a traditional cleavage is its salience, that is, the degree to which it dominates the conflicts in the political arenas. Bartolini and Mair introduce this term to assess the relative importance of a given cleavage with respect to other cleavages in the context of electoral competition. We propose instead to apply it to the significance of a given cleavage in the context of political competition in the extraparliamentary arena of movement politics. From this perspective, a cleavage is salient to the extent that it has not been institutionalized and, therefore, pacified. The institutionalization of a political cleavage implies that it becomes regulated by established procedures, that the groups involved are integrated into the political networks in the administrative and the parliamentary arenas, and that they abandon the challenging of authorities by unconventional means.

The institutionalization of a cleavage does not imply that it no longer gives rise to political competition. It only implies that the competition is no longer taking place in unconventional terms. By definition, a pacified cleavage no longer gives rise to political mobilization on a large scale outside of the parliamentary or administrative arenas. In contrast, it is rather likely that precisely this will happen in the case of a nonpacified cleavage. Moreover, it is essential for the present context not only that a nonpacified traditional cleavage is likely to give rise to political mobilization by unconventional means, but that it also tends to provide master frames for the interpretation of movement politics, that it tends to absorb the general public’s attention and to occupy the political agenda of both conventional and movement politics to an extent that goes far beyond the more or less narrow confines of the social groups directly involved in the cleavage in question. Accordingly, a nonpacified traditional cleavage sets important constraints on the political opportunities for the mobilization of new social movements.

Note that this second aspect of the mobilization potential of a cleavage is quite distinct from the previous one. At first sight, a cleavage characterized by highly distinct and internally coherent groups is not likely to be institutionalized. But, if pacification of a closed cleavage is difficult to obtain, it is not impossible. It is conceivable that the strongly segmented groups maintain routinized, peaceful, and stable relationships with each other on the level of their representatives. Even if the ordinary members of the groups hardly have any contact with each other at all, their elites may be integrated into the political process and maintain good relations with each other. The Dutch system of “pillarization” provides the most prominent example of this configuration of a more or less pacified coexistence of segmented groups. Both the religious and the class cleavage constituted internally highly integrated groups in the Netherlands, which, nevertheless, maintained rather peaceful relationships with each other. The highly integrated character of the separate groups may actually be instrumental in the stabilization of the relationships on the elite level, since it allows the elites to control their grassroots base quite successfully. One may go even one step further, as do some authors in the debate on neocorporatism (e.g., Schmitter 1981), and suggest that the integrated internal structure of the groups involved in a given cleavage is a precondition for the institutionalization of intergroup relationships.

Combining the two aspects of the mobilization potential of a political cleavage, we arrive at four types of traditional cleavages with quite different mobilization capacities. Table 1.1 provides an overview of these types. First, take the case of a closed traditional cleavage that has been pacified. This is the case illustrated by the Dutch system of pillarization just mentioned. In this case, the traditional cleavage no longer gives rise to political mobilization outside of the conventional channels. Given its closure, however, the potential capacity for mobilization of the traditional cleavage is still important. The situation is one of “latency” Although the members of the social groups involved are not actively mobilized on the basis of the traditional cleavage, they will not be available for the mobilization by new social movements, given the closure of the traditional groups.

Table 1.1. Typology for the mobilization potential of traditional cleavages

Closure of the cleavage	Salience of the cleavage
	Pacified	Not pacified
Closed	Latent potential	“Exclusively” mobilized potential
Open	Available potential for new mobilization	“Inclusively” mobilized potential

To the extent that the traditional elites lose their hold over their respective client groups—that is, to the extent that the closure of these groups weakens and they are opening up—their members may become avail...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I. General Concepts and Basic Results
• Part II. Elaborations
• Conclusion
• The Newspaper Data Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Index