Martin Seymour Lipset and Stein Rokkan

Cleavage Structures, Party Systems, and Voter Alignments

This was one of the required reading for the political sociology course that I took, and perhaps the most difficult one of all. The paper is about 50 page long, for the prelim we are assigned only the latter half. They must have lost something in omitting the first half for the prelim reading list; the paper makes no sense at all without reading those pages first. Accordingly, my summary is on all 50 pages, not only the latter half.

This is an introduction to the series of essays attempting to answer several of major questions within the field of comparative political sociology. The first set of questions is about the genesis of political cleavages that engender different alignments of political systems. What kind of cleavages exist in the society to start out with? Which of them are most important, or persistent? The second set of questions is about the process of transformation of these cleavages into actualized political system, such as party alignment - which leads to stable system of cleavages and oppositions in the political context? Why did some conflicts lead to the formation of distinctive parties, and others not? Which of the existing conflicts have been most salient in that process? Did that process foster engendering of further opposition parties? The third set of questions concerns the behavior of individual citizens in the resultant party system. Were the parties successful in recruiting members from the citizenry? What are the characteristics of the voters? Did the changes in economic, social, and cultural spheres affect parties' varying success in recruiting and consolidating members? These three are basically the set of questions addressed in this book - however, substantively they will be dealt with fully in the subsequent works in this volume, so what this introductory essay does is to propose a broad theoretical framework that should be useful in answering these questions. In proposing this overall framework, the continual stress is placed on the historical and developmental nature of the analytical framework adopted. That is, instead of looking at the working mechanisms of political parties cross-sectionally, the authors regard that it is particularly important to start out the analysis by focusing on the inchoate condition of the cleavages before the political system crystallized and then proceed to analyze the changes that have shaped these political systems followingly. With their strong emphasis on the historical processes, their approach can be considered one of historical sociology focusing on the political structure.

The theoretical framework the authors profess is divided into three sections to match the aforementioned three broad questions of political sociology. Accordingly, the first model tries to provide for the overarching framework that encompasses variations of the cleavage structure that could be residing in any particular society. Briefly, this model has two dimensions of cleavages in terms of functional matters and center-periphery contrast. The former dimension has cleavages of ideological oppositions and the interest specific oppositions as polar opposites, and most existing real cleavages are supposed to fall somewhere in between these two polar opposites. The latter dimension has local-regional oppositions and oppositions within nationally established regimes as polar opposites, and likewise the real cleavages are supposed to fall in between them. Roughly, this is the idea of the model (See the figure on p. 10). By locating existing cleavages along these two dimensions of cleavage scale, the authors claim we can systematize and contrast the different political circumstances different societies had been facing historically meaningfully. Further, the authors set forth that, this scheme being rather abstract, we can actually identify four specific types of cleavages that have repeatedly characterized most of the European societies, and locate each of them in the aforementioned dimension of scale. They are: subject and dominant culture conflict, church and government conflict, primary and secondary economy conflict (landed aristocrats vs. newly arising industrial elites), and workers and employers conflict (See the figure on p. 14). In historical perspective, it is important to note that the first two are the products of the so-called National Revolutions, those revolutions such as the French Revolution that had directly to do with institutionalizing the nation-states in place of the Medieval political structure based on feudal rule by the landed aristocracy. The last two are, then, the products of the Industrial Revolution. It then follows that it is imperative for the analyst to study the particular social and political contexts comparatively each society embodied at the time these two Revolutions occurred.

The second theoretical framework is a tool for the systematic analysis of the second question: how the cleavage structures are actually turned into the party systems in the society. In answering this question, the authors note that it is particularly important for the researchers to look at the conditions for the expression of protest and the representation of interests in each society. More specifically, what they propose to focus on are largely the concerns typical with those of the mobilization theorists of the social movement study. Briefly, some of those concerns are: what are the traditions of decision making in the policy? What sort of channels for the expression and mobilization of protests are made available for the people? What were the payoffs, opportunities, and the costs of alliances? That is, was it easy or difficult for the old movements to broaden their support basis; Was it in turn easy or difficult for the new movements to gain representation for themselves? And lastly, what sort of alliances were likely to bring about the majority rule, and how much influence was that majority rule were in turn able to exercise? These questions then lead to what are called the threshold of representation, in the sense that how much difficulty newly arising movements pressing their demands are likely to encounter in the course of gaining legitimacy and representation within the polity. These four thresholds are that of: legitimation, incorporation, representation, and majority power. By categorizing different societies as having different levels of threshold for each of the four, the systematic comparison of the party structure formation is possible, the authors propose (See pages 27-9). Another important point made in this section is that it is important to realize party structure ensuing is not merely the passive result of whatever the electoral patterns set in a society, but the parties are capable for altering electoral patterns to their advantage (Notice how this perspective is fundamentally different from that of Downs).

The third and final set of the theoretical framework is a tool for the systematic analysis of how these political oppositions and party structures established in last section in turn came to be a stable system of party politics with distinctive pattern of citizen alignments behind each parties. Being consistent to their historical stance toward the analysis of political parties, the authors state that this formation of party systems must be looked on as the developmental process. More specifically, in most modern nations the party systems are distinctively the products of the two Revolutions: the National Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution, and how they interacted with each other to shape the developmental course of political structure of different nation-states as they were in the inchoate stage of state-building. It is particularly interesting that authors claim most of the differences in party structure in contemporary European nations are due to the first three types of the formerly mentioned four types of cleavage structure, that is all except the class-based worker-employer conflict. The latter, they claim, tends to be the cause of the similarities they share. And finally, this is how their model on party structure consolidation during the times of the nation building looks like. Briefly, this is a three-way model that proposes: by looking at how the incumbent regime made a choice regarding with whom they should ally with at the juncture of decision making, that in turn constrains the type of alliances oppositions come to form - thus this developmental process roughly shapes the pattern of party alignments altogether. Followingly, the junctures at which incumbents must make a decision are, whom to ally with at the religious front of conflict, and whom to ally with at the economic front of conflict. They note that empirically, the combination of these factors led to eight different pattern of party alignments historically (See the table on p. 37). This in turn has constrained the way opposition groups could have formed their own alliance patterns. Then, this scheme is supposed to correspond to the other half of systematic categorization scheme developed in this section. This scheme looks at how the ruling state made a decision regarding with whom they should be allied with at the three important historical juncture. They are, naturally, the National Revolution, the wake of "Democratic Revolution" after 1789, and the Industrial Revolution (See the table on p. 38).

Finally, there was a sense in the Political Sociology course that this paper was considered more important for the empirical classification, rather than theoretical, purposes. As such, you may not have to read the paper too closely as Prof. Clark also knows it is rather a complex paper to remember for an in-class exam, but if you have time then at least try to memorize the tables on pages that I have listed in parentheses.