Explanations

The field's most important and hotly-contested question is the relative importance of agency and structure in the emergence of cleavages. 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. This approach also highlights the role of political institutions (electoral system, structure of government, media regulation, party finance) which may shape the room for the social-attitudinal-organizational anchorage of politics. A closer look at the role of elites in building cleavages may also contribute to the understanding of the geographic and temporal variance in the strength of social-attitudinal-organizational constraints of party politics and may focus attention on the dynamic perspective of cleavages that has been particularly neglected in the past (Mair 2006, 372).

Although contemporary structural accounts of cleavage formation tend to do an excellent job of predicting what cleavages will not emerge, such accounts are less successful in predicting when new cleavages may develop or why some potential cleavages crowd out others. As a result, a significant body of research has developed to analyze the interplay between social divisions and political agency. Studies by Kitschelt set the stage for the most systematic and comprehensive exploration of these interrelationships (1994, 1995, Kitschelt et al. 1999, Kitschelt and Rehm 2004). Subsequent work by other scholars emphasizes the institutional mechanisms by which elites politicize social divisions and establish coalitions between social groups (Chhibber and Torcal 1997, Posner, 2004, Enyedi 2005).  According to the distinctly agency-centered approaches, elites not only increase the salience of existing structural differences but also define the structural divides.  This is the tradition of Sartori (1969), Zuckerman (1975), Przeworski and Sprague (1986), Bartolini (2000) and Kriesi (1998), who emphasized the capacity of parties to create identities, form communities, and reinforce the structural and cultural distinctiveness of professional groups and classes. Research in new democracies, especially in Latin America and postcommunist Europe, has further highlighted the power of political elites to define the dimensions of competition (Mainwaring 1999, Mainwaring and Torcal 2003). There is an increasing interest in the role of epistemic communities and collateral organizations (for comparative data for the latter see Poguntke 2002) in creating and maintaining barriers between political camps.

The potential degree of elite-led cleavage formation obviously depends to some degree on underlying factors, however, and recent research has also begun to test the conditions which permitting politicization (or depoliticizaiton) of attitudes and structural elements. A larger number of raw structural differences seems to increase the role of elites simply by allowing for more choices about which difference to politicize (Deegan-Krause 2006).  Others also emphasize the role of institutional constraints: Mainwaring (1999) identifies a range of ways in which states can shape party systems and the associated divides and cleavages; Posner (2001) emphasizes the degree to which some electoral systems may favor top-down effects on  cleavages; van de Walle (2003) and Hagopian (2004) note the role of clientelist institutions in undermining efforts to politicize particular issues; Chhibber (2001) suggests that leaders have greater influence over cleavages in settings with weak civil society, and he along with a number of others focus on the constrains imposed on party elites by internal party organization (Burgess and Levitsky 2003). Most such studies remain at the national or regional level, however, and there is a significant need for comparative research that can specify the type of elite influence on cleavage formation and test the conditions which foster such influence.