Cleavage, or ‘social cleavage’, is a vital concept in much political science analysis, especially in relation to voting behaviour or the formation and working of party systems. It designates a division between groups within a society, based on some more or less fixed attribute: one can have cleavages along lines of class, religion, language, race or even, conceivably, sex. The patterns of social cleavages, their interrelationship, salience, number and nature, used to determine the battle lines of competitive politics and generally influence the stability and functioning of the political system. To a large extent this sort of patterning is still crucial, despite an overall tendency towards dealignment in many societies. In origin at least, most political parties represent a given side as defined by one or more cleavage lines, and are likely to be opposed by parties representing the other side or sides. If the politics of a society are based on certain kinds of cleavage patterns, political life is likely to be more violent, and government less competent, than if other cleavages dominate. For example, racial or religious cleavages, if at all strong, are much harder to manage by bargaining and compromise than class cleavages, because they tend to produce absolute demands. The interrelationship between cleavages can also be vitally important. If they reinforce each other, so that two people who are opposed along one cleavage are likely also to be opposed along a second, the temperature of political conflict is likely to be high. Where one finds ‘cross-cutting’ cleavages—where, for example, opponents on religious issues are likely to find themselves on the same side when the issue is language—intense conflict may well be avoided. One reason why the politics of language in Belgium causes such stress, and parliamentary instability, is that the Flemish–Walloon cleavage largely coincides with Catholic–anti-clerical and economic cleavages.
By contrast, Italy’s survival during the extremely difficult post-war years may have been due partly to the fact that the vital class cleavage in the country did not correspond very closely to the religious–secular cleavage. The Catholic ruling party, the Christian Democrats (see Christian democracy), attracted many working-class votes that would probably otherwise have gone to the communists or socialists, while many middle-class voters who rebelled against clerical control in politics were led to vote for left-wing parties. The decline of one of these cleavages, religion, contributed to the collapse of the Italian party system in the early 1990s; the resulting unstable party coalitions are due to the absence of a well-structured cleavage system.
The sheer number of cleavages within any society has a lot to do with whether it has a multi-party system, and thus is likely to be governed by possibly unstable coalitions, or a two- or three-party system which may be more likely to produce stable one-party governments. If any pattern exists in the development of cleavages it is probably towards simplification, in particular through a reduction in the importance of secondary cleavages. The Netherlands, for example, used to have a Roman Catholic party and not one, but two, Protestant parties, which in 1980 merged to form a single Christian party. In addition, other parties in the Netherlands have consolidated along conventional class and issue lines, illustrating the declining importance of religious cleavage.
Many cleavage patterns are essentially involuntary: a person is white, or has been baptized and brought up Catholic or speaks a specific language by virtue of birth, not as a matter of opinion or values. This is well demonstrated by the example of Northern Ireland, split by a religious cleavage, where one cannot escape the conflict by being an atheist—it will still be asked whether one is a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist. Furthermore, research shows that there is nothing in the specific theological differences between the two denominations which accounts for the hostility between the groups. The most enduring cleavages are deeply historical in origin, closely bound with the development of nationhood, and often outlive subsequent historical development. In the USA, the North–South cleavage dates from before the Civil War (1861–65), even though there are no longer any good economic reasons for people to see their lives much affected by this particular distinction.
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