Political Cleavage Analysis

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.