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3 From Structure to Culture and Back The Perpetuation and Transformation of Historical Cleavages Despite more or less thirty years of close reading by countless scholars in a variety of different fields, and despite what is now a genuinely voluminous literature seeking to explore and often test the ramifications of the so-called “freezing hypothesis”, there still remains a marked degree of confusion about what precisely was believed by Lipset and Rokkan to have settled into place by the 1920s. (Mair 2001: 27) The mobilization of the historical cleavages identified by Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan (1967), in processes lasting to the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, have given birth to the modern party systems in Europe. Subsequently, the full mobilization of European electorates led to a “freezing” of the major party alternatives. A crucial characteristic of Western European competitive politics, according to Lipset and Rokkan (1990 [1967]: 134), is that “the party alternatives, and in remarkably many cases the party organizations, are older than the majorities of national electorates.” Assuming a zero-sum relationship between established cleavages and new divides, as suggested by Hanspeter Kriesi and Jan Willem Duyvendak (1995), the aim of this chapter is to develop a model to assess how established conflicts limit the room for parties that are mobilizing on new issue dimensions . Applying a cleavage perspective to contemporary developments, however , requires a conceptual reassessment of the approach. While the narrow 54 / Chapter 3 focus on the socio-structural underpinnings of voting choices in much of the literature on cleavages was criticized early on (Sartori 1968; Zuckerman 1975), a new strand of research focusing on the role of agency in cleavage formation has emerged only recently (e.g., Deegan-Krause 2006; Enyedi 2005). I suggest paying attention to the role of agency not only in the initial formation of a cleavage but also in its perpetuation. In developing a dynamic account of the cleavage concept, I argue that a more adequate understanding of the importance of collective identities in perpetuating long-term political alignments is necessary. If cleavages are formed by the interplay between structural or cultural similarities and the formation of a collective consciousness of social groups, then their continued salience must result from the stability of these collective identifications. A central factor that keeps these identities alive, I claim, is political conflict. Furthermore, the stability of party systems depends on whether parties adequately represent voters along old and new issue dimensions. The model proposed in this chapter thus incorporates the force of collective political identifications and the responsiveness of the party system to voters’ preferences. I develop a typology of cleavages and other divisions from which hypotheses are derived concerning the mobilization potential of new conflicts. While the approach developed in this chapter is not specific to explaining the rise of the right-wing populist party family, it is tested in later chapters to explain why the populist right has succeeded in breaking into some party systems but not others. The Cleavage Concept and the Historical Experience of Europe The Formation of Cleavages and Party Systems Across Europe, the twin processes of the national and industrial revolutions constituted “critical junctures” that determined subsequent political development and led to long-term alignments between social groups and political parties . In Rokkan’s model (Lipset and Rokkan 1967; Rokkan 1999), the process of nation building resulted in conflicts that are territorial, on the one hand, and cultural, on the other. The center-periphery cleavage was triggered by “the conflict between the central nation-building culture and the increasing resistance of the ethnically, linguistically, or religiously distinct subject populations in the provinces and the peripheries,” while the religious cleavage developed from “the conflict between the centralizing, standardizing, and mobilizing Nation-State and the historically established corporate privileges of the Church” (Lipset and Rokkan 1990 [1967]: 101). As opposed to these cultural conflicts, functional oppositions have arisen only after a certain degree of internal and external consolidation of the national territory and a certain level of cultural standardization (Bartolini 2005: chap. 2; From Structure to Culture and Back / 55 Caramani 2004). Going back to Rokkan (1999), cross-local oppositions first resulted from the industrial revolution, which in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century produced two cleavages: a sectoral cleavage between the primary and secondary sectors of the economy, placing agricultural and industrial interests into opposition, and, as the historically youngest divide, the class cleavage. While the class cleavage has...

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