POLS2010 Chap.5 Cleavages and Ideology
Cleavages and Ideology
Cleavage theory explains where party systems come from. This chapter starts with Lipset and Rokkan’s argument that the national and industrial revolutions produced four deep divides, centre and periphery, state and church, urban and rural, owners and workers, which parties froze into the party systems of the 1920s.
It then applies the three-part definition of a cleavage, social, psychological and organisational, to show why class and religion have weakened and whether a new transnational divide over education, immigration and European integration qualifies.
The ideology part uses survey experiments on immigration and redistribution to show how perceptions shape policy preferences.
The material connects forward to several later weeks.
The education and generation changes reappear in electoral change in Week 8, the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom case in Week 11, and the winners and losers of globalization in Week 12. Learning the three-part test here gives you a tool for all of those answers.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Two revolutions and four historic cleavages
- 02
The freezing hypothesis
- 03
Social, psychological and organisational components
- 04
Dealignment and cognitive mobilisation
- 05
Is cleavage theory a theory?
- 06
The transnational or GAL/TAN divide
- 07
Immigration perceptions and redistribution
Worked example · free
Matching a conflict to its revolution and cleavage
- 1The minority resisting the capital’s language policy is the centre and periphery cleavage.
- 1That cleavage comes from the national revolution, when nation-builders imposed a dominant culture on peripheral groups.
- 1The wage conflict between owners and workers is the labour and capital cleavage.
- 1It comes from the industrial revolution, which also produced the urban and rural divide.
Key terms
- Cleavage
- A durable political division that rests on a social group with shared interests, a sense of common identity and organisation by political parties.
- Freezing hypothesis
- Lipset and Rokkan’s claim that the party systems of the 1960s reflected, with few exceptions, the cleavage structures of the 1920s.
- Transnational cleavage
- Hooghe and Marks’s name for a divide over European integration and immigration that sets radical right parties against green parties.
- Cognitive mobilisation
- Dalton’s argument that education and access to information let voters choose as individuals rather than as members of social groups.
- Critical juncture
- A decisive historical moment, such as the Reformation or industrialisation, whose outcome shapes political divisions for long afterwards.
Cleavages and Ideology FAQ
What are the four cleavages in Lipset and Rokkan?
Centre against periphery and state against church, which came out of the national revolutions, and urban against rural and owners against workers, which came out of the industrial revolution. Each country’s combination depended on critical junctures such as the Reformation and control of mass education.
Is education a new cleavage in Europe?
Many scholars think it is becoming one. The expansion of higher education created a large graduate electorate whose values on rights, diversity and national identity differ from those of voters with few qualifications. The open question is organisation, since the divide is often measured through party emphasis rather than organised social groups.
How can perceptions of immigration change support for welfare?
In surveys of about 24,000 people in six countries, respondents greatly overestimated the immigrant share of the population, and simply prompting them to think about immigration lowered their support for redistribution. Believing immigrants rely on welfare mattered more than perceived cultural distance.
Why did class voting decline in Western Europe?
Secularisation weakened religious voting, falling union membership undermined labour parties, and more educated voters became instrumental rather than expressive in how they voted. Work itself grew more complex, so a single class identity no longer predicted a person’s interests or vote as reliably as it once did.
Exam move
Memorise the four cleavages as two pairs tied to their revolutions, then rehearse the three-part definition until you can test any proposed new cleavage against it in a paragraph. Collect one country example for each historic cleavage, such as Belgium for centre and periphery, so your answers have evidence. For the modern debate, prepare a short argument for and against the claim that the education divide is a cleavage.
Finally, keep the redistribution experiment in mind as an example of ideology working through perceptions, which can strengthen essays on immigration, parties or globalization. For a final check, write a timed answer on whether the freezing hypothesis still holds, using one country where historic cleavages persist and one where new divides have reshaped competition.
Mark it against the three-part definition, and make sure every claim about a group names the party that mobilises it.
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