Cleavage (politics)

[5] The main explanation they give for this is that with the development of labor parties as well as the introduction of universal suffrage at the beginning of the 20th century all groups of civil society were in a way represented in the political arenas of these states.

[5] According to Paul Pierson, the account by Lipset and Rokkan typifies path dependence, as cleavages at particular critical junctures led to stable party systems.

As the authors claim, the fascist or national-socialist authoritarian politics of for example Spain, Italy and Germany were not based on these historical cleavages.

[5] From the 1960s onwards, the party systems discussed in Lipset and Rokkan's theory partially 'unfroze' as the traditional cleavages seemed to become less deterministic for voting behaviors than before.

[12] While this brings into question the continued existence of the Left-Right cleavage, it also leaves room for voters to based their vote on factors other than class, such a concerns regarding the environment or immigration.

[22] This is known as Populism and many examples from the 2020s can be highlighted: the election of several populist presidents and parties (Erdogan in Turkey, Trump in the US, The Five Stars Movement in Italy), the vote of citizens (the 2016-UK-referendum leading to the Brexit).

[23] In terms of electoral outcomes and emerging patterns in voting behaviour, Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart argue that both the rise of populism, and this new cleavage can be used to explain why the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in 2016, and President Donald Trump's successful bid for the American presidency the same year.

[23] According to Robert Ford and Will Jennings, new cleavages are forming in Western democracies around education, age, geography, and attitudes to immigration.

These cleavages were made politically salient due to increased ethnic diversity and certain structural economic changes for advanced economies in the last decades.