About this Page:

We have designed this page as a place for open-source discussion and exchange of information and insight related to the concept of cleavage in social science.  The immediate focus of the page's discussion is preparation for the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) 2007 Helsinki Workshop no. 19 entitled "Politicising Socio-Cultural Structures: Elite and Mass Perspectives on Cleavages.  The broader goal is to serve as a forum for thinking (and rethinking) about the causes and consequences of the fundamental divides that shape domestic political competition around the world and for sharing experience across regions, disciplines and methodological specializations.

The nature of wiki pages such as this one is open, relatively unmoderated discussion.  We encourage participants add, modify or delete information on any of these pages (including this one) at will.  For the purposes of this discussion, others will find supplements or challenges to another author's work more useful than outright deletion.  Others will also find it more useful to see who has made the supplements or challenge, so please be sure to specify your name when the site prompts you to do so at login.  Since we are using pbwiki to host this discussion, we must abide by their policy of requiring a password to make changes, but the password is available to all ECPR workshop participants and to anyone who would care to request it.  To make such a request or to offer any other comments or questions, please email us at ecpr2007cleavages@gmail.com.  

Discussion Pages for 2007 ECPR Helsinki Workshop

• Concepts and Definitions:

  New! Discussion on "Conceptualizing Cleavage"

  Despite a few commonly cited conceptual frameworks—Bartolini and Mair (1990) and Knutsen and Scarbrough (1995)—scholars still differ quite dramatically in their understandings of “cleavage.”  Scholars still do not agree about 1) what combinations of socio-structural, attitudinal, organizational and behavioural elements can be defined as cleavage or 2) how the list of cleavage categories derived from the tradition of Lipset and Rokkan must be altered to apply to cases outside of Western Europe and to fit the new employment and communication structures of industrial democracies. 

• Data and Methods:

  The study of cleavages can benefit significantly from striking improvements in recent decades in the emergence of new data archives (frequent, cross-national mass-level surveys, elite-actor surveys, academic-expert surveys, content analysis of party and media documents, and deeply-disaggregated electoral and census data) and new methods for analyzing this data (particularly especially ecological analysis, various multinomial techniques and new qualitative methods). 

• Explanations:

  The lesson of four decades of scholarship, spanning from Lipset and Rokan (1967) and Sartori (1969), is that this “classic dichotomy” (Hagopian 2004, 5) of political science must be transcended by understanding the circumstances in which top-down or bottom-up effects are most likely. In practice, this means identifying the conditions and the techniques which allow political leaders to overcome socio-structural constraints, draw lines of conflict between some groups, bind other groups into stable coalitions and even shape the contours and coherence of groups themselves. 

• Consequences:

  Any exploration of the causes of cleavage must also deal with their consequences, particularly for the quality of democracy. Beyond questions related to the number of parties in a party system, there is strikingly little research that deals with the ways that particular kinds of cleavage affect the stability of democracy (or the progress of democratization), the quality of democracy (according to standards such as representation), and the types of policies that emerge as a result.

Related On-Going Projects

Many scholars are working on related issues at their own sites.  Read here to find out about them and, if you wish, to add your own work and website.

Cleavages Bibliography Project:

Find out about how to produce and use a joint, open-source web2.0 bibliographic database at http://www.citeulike.org/user/ecpr2007cleavages.