Compare methods

	Political Cleavage Analysis	Economic Voting Analysis
Field	Political Economy	Political Economy
Family	Process / pipeline	MCDM
Year of origin	1967	1971
Originator	Seymour Martin Lipset & Stein Rokkan	Gerald Kramer; Michael Lewis-Beck & Mary Stegmaier
Type	Historical-comparative framework	Formal reward-punishment model of voting
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	Kramer, G. H. (1971). Short-Term Fluctuations in U.S. Voting Behavior, 1896-1964. American Political Science Review, 65(1), 131-143.
Aliases	Lipset-Rokkan Model, Cleavage Structure Analysis, Social Cleavage Theory, Cleavage Politics Framework	Reward-Punishment Model, Retrospective Voting Model, Economic Vote Function, Responsibility Hypothesis
Related	3	4
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.	Economic voting analysis is the formal study of how voters reward or punish incumbents according to economic performance. In the reward-punishment (retrospective) model pioneered by Gerald Kramer in 1971, support for the governing party is a function of recent economic outcomes — growth, unemployment, and inflation — so that good times re-elect incumbents and bad times turn them out. Michael Lewis-Beck and Mary Stegmaier's 2000 review consolidated the field, establishing that economic voting is predominantly sociotropic (based on the national economy rather than personal finances) and that its strength depends on the clarity of responsibility: how easily voters can attribute outcomes to the incumbent.