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	Political Cleavage Analysis	Comparative Political Economy
Field	Political Economy	Political Economy
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1967	2001
Originator	Seymour Martin Lipset & Stein Rokkan	Comparative politics & political economy tradition (Shonfield, Katzenstein, Hall, Soskice)
Type	Historical-comparative framework	Macro-comparative research framework
Seminal source	Lipset, S. M., & Rokkan, S. (1967). Cleavage Structures, Party Systems, and Voter Alignments: An Introduction. In S. M. Lipset & S. Rokkan (Eds.), Party Systems and Voter Alignments. Free Press. ISBN: 9780029191507	Hall, P. A., & Soskice, D. (Eds.). (2001). Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780199247752
Aliases	Lipset-Rokkan Model, Cleavage Structure Analysis, Social Cleavage Theory, Cleavage Politics Framework	CPE, Comparative Capitalisms Approach, Macro-Comparative Political Economy, Institutional Political Economy
Related	3	3
Summary	Political cleavage analysis explains the structure of party systems by reference to durable social divisions, following Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan's 1967 account of cleavage structures, party systems, and voter alignments. Their argument is that the national and industrial revolutions produced four enduring cleavages — center versus periphery, state versus church, land versus industry, and owner versus worker — and that these divisions, frozen into party systems by the time of mass enfranchisement, continued to organize voter alignments long afterward. A full cleavage, as later refined by Bartolini and Mair, requires more than a social division: it needs a collective identity and an organizational expression that translate the division into politics.	Comparative political economy (CPE) is the subfield that asks how political institutions and markets interact to produce different economic outcomes across capitalist democracies, and the macro-comparative research strategy that subfield employs. Rather than treating the economy as a self-contained system, CPE treats production regimes, labor markets, finance, welfare states, and innovation as politically constructed and institutionally embedded, then compares how distinct national configurations — for instance the liberal market economies and coordinated market economies of Hall and Soskice's varieties-of-capitalism framework — generate systematically different patterns of wages, growth, inequality, and adjustment. The approach combines small-N case comparison and large-N cross-national analysis under a shared institutionalist logic.