Party Systems and Voter Alignments Revisited

Lauri Karvonen, Stein Kuhnle, Lauri Karvonen, Stein Kuhnle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415237208
• eBook ISBN: 9781134560035
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This timely book updates, and takes stock of, Lipset and Rokkan's classic work Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives, an influential work since its publication in 1967. It examines the significance of the original volume for the history of political sociology, and assesses its theoretical and empirical relevance for the study of contemporary elections, voters and parties. Most importantly this volume gives scope to new areas such as consociational democracies, small island states, and newly democratising Eastern and Central European and Third World countries.

Revisited themes

5
Are cleavages frozen in the English-speaking democracies?

Richard S.Katz

It would be hard to overstate the influence of Party Systems and Voter Alignments, and particularly of the introductory chapter by Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan (1967a), on the study of political parties and party systems, or on the study of electoral behaviour, in Europe. Thirty years after its publication, it is still widely cited, and indeed if one traces the provenance of other citations, there are not many works on the subject that are not directly or indirectly indebted to this essay. It has proven to be a seminal work in the fullest sense of the word.

The chapter is extraordinarily rich, moving from the high-level abstraction of Talcott Parsons’ four-fold paradigm for the analysis of societal interchanges, to the concrete details of the historical experiences of individual countries. It can be read and re-read with profit from many perspectives, and for the insights and suggestions it offers on many important questions. Nonetheless, if there is one key contribution, one key finding or conjecture, that assures the essay its place on the required reading lists of students of parties and elections, it is the idea of “frozen cleavages”.

At its simplest level, the frozen cleavages hypothesis is simply the observation that “the party systems of the 1960s reflect, with few but significant exceptions, the cleavage structures of the 1920s…the party alternatives, and in remarkably many cases the party organizations, are older the majorities of the national electorates.” (50, italics in original). This is accompanied by a tentative explanation of why cleavages would have become frozen by the 1920s:

It is difficult to see any significant exceptions to the rule that the parties which were able to establish mass organizations and entrench themselves in the local government structures before the final drive to maximal mobilization have proved the most viable. The narrowing of the “support market” brought about through the growth of mass parties during this final thrust toward full-suffrage democracy clearly left very few openings for new movements.

(51)

This suggestion that the “support market” was narrowed in the adoption of and adaptation to manhood suffrage can be read in two ways. On one hand, it may refer to the demand side of the market; with the integration of the working class into full citizenship, there were no large groups of potential supporters waiting to be mobilized by a new set of leaders. On the other hand, it may refer to the supply side, suggesting that with the integration of the working class, there were no further cleavages to be made politically relevant. If this second reading suggests that somehow history came to an end in the 1920s, the first suggests that partisan mobilization is a one way street, and that once integrated into the support structure of a political party, a citizen, and indeed his (or once the vote was extended to women, her) descendants are no longer available for competing or newly arising parties. Lipset and Rokkan, of course, recognize the unreasonableness of these extreme interpretations, and in the concluding paragraphs of the chapter discuss processes that might lead the frozen cleavages to “melt”.

That said, the greater part of the chapter is devoted to an account of how the party and cleavage systems found in Europe in the 1920s came to be the way they were. In large measure, this too is observational rather than theoretical. The process is hypothesized to have been driven by elite choices, but while those choices are assumed/asserted to be constrained by a number of logical or historically driven rules, within the broad bounds set by those constraints, there is no attempt to explain why one country’s nation-builders or their opponents made one set of choices rather than another. Instead, Lipset and Rokkan “start out with a review of a variety of logically possible sources of strains and oppositions in social structures and …then proceed to an inventory of the empirically extant examples of political expressions of each set of conflicts” (6, italics in original). This approach finally leads to a list of eight potential types of cleavage alignments and an example for each of the closest fitting European party system.

In more detail, the model gives pride of place to two historical “revolutions”, each of which potentially generated two cleavages. The first revolution is the National Revolution, spawning first a split between the centre and the periphery and then, especially in those countries that remained loyal to Rome at the time of the Reformation, between church and state. The second revolution is the Industrial Revolution, spawning first a split between land and industry and then between owners and workers. Both who allied with whom, and whether the split was in fact actualized, with regard to the first three of these potential cleavages varied among European countries, leading to the eight types; the fourth, the class cleavage, they have in common, and as just suggested, it is the actualization of this cleavage that is claimed to have “frozen” the party systems.

Frozen cleavages in the English-speaking democracies?

Attempting to assess the (continued) utility of this work—both the frozen cleavages hypothesis and the theoretical model/reasoning that underlies it —for th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• INTRODUCTION
• THEORETICAL AND ANALYTICAL DEVELOPMENTS
• REVISITED THEMES
• NEW PERSPECTIVES AND AREAS
• Bibliography