Cleavage (politics)

The cleavage theory (English cleavage: gulf ',' split ') is a political science theory in the choice of research that tries to explain election results in European States on the basis of long-term lines of conflict within society.

The theory was developed in 1967 by the two political scientists Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan. Their approach is one of the main theories to explain the emergence and persistence of national party systems. Due to the political upheavals in the last thirty years ( advent of the environmental movement, collapse of the socialist states, emergence of the New Right, etc. ) consists in political science, however, increasingly the view through that traditional cleavages lose in Western industrial societies in importance and thus the explanatory power Cleavage of the theory decreases.

Theoretical Approach

The cleavage theory is based on the assumption that it is not easy are two groups of supporters and opponents of political decisions, but a more or less continuous array of voters on a policy dimension, which can be assigned to the positions of the parties. The individual chooses in elections for the party whose policy offers are his ideal point closest. Accordingly, a line of conflict which runs at right angles to the policy dimension line which separates the supporters and opponents at a specific vote. Permanent lines of conflict are when the relevant policy dimensions are relevant repeated for concrete decisions and when voters fall apart again and again in the same groups of supporters and opponents.

Lipset and Rokkan (1967 ) shows that European party systems in the late 19th century developed based on four fundamental lines of conflict. The lines of conflict are permanent and reflect interests or conflicts of values ​​of various organized social groups. The organizations of these social groups built connections to certain policy-makers, which of these compounds in the long term emerged political parties:

The Cleavage approach is a successful tool to explain the formation of the party systems in the developed European countries. In a period of great stability of the majorities of the parties in the democratic states he had a high explanatory power. Since the 1980s, however, a break in the party systems can be seen, the long-term commitment to any particular party is empirically detectable always lower. These are effects that can be reconciled with the cleavage theory is difficult to match. Also can not explain the declining voter turnout and protest voting behavior with the cleavage theory. Right-wing populist parties or ecological fall just from the explanatory framework.

In the West German postwar society on the theory that the two lines of conflict were formative state against church and labor against capital. In the conflict between church and state focused in particular on the question of which possessed the prerogative of interpretation in the education of both institutions. While the Union parties, and especially the German Centre Party preferred religious bound religious schools, SPD, FDP and KPD were for governmental and religious independent schools. Finally, the separation of church and state prevailed largely, although individual religious schools have been preserved until today.

The FDP and the CDU, however, held similar views in the economic and social policy, while the SPD ( and until their ban the KPD) itself, understood as a pure party of the working particularly in the early years of the Federal Republic. The center was divided in this respect. The economic and socio- political model of the " bourgeois " parties, the social market economy, socialist ideas largely supplanted. This was recognized by the SPD in the Godesberg Program of 1959 largely.

With the advent of the Greens in the 1980s, a new line of conflict between the so-called post-material values ​​and the traditional political values ​​developed. Although weakened, these cleavages are also in today's political debate still clearly visible, including the reform of social systems ( capital versus labor ), the reform of federalism and decentralization policy in France, Italy and the UK ( center to periphery) or in dealing with the religious confrontation with Islam ( Church against State).