The Conflict-of-Conflicts and Cleavage Stability in a Volatile Age

Twenty-first-century European politics can be summarized with a single word, change. Over the past decades, new actors have challenged the dominance of Europe’s mainstream parties by injecting new issues into political discourse. These efforts have arguably led to the rise of a new cleavage driven by growing transnationalism anchored by sorting along educational lines. While support for parties of this cleavage and their sociological bases have been (and will continue to be) studied extensively, the notion of a cleavage suggests not just magnitude but hold. Does this new cleavage offer an island of electoral stability in an otherwise volatile political landscape, or has this conflict-of-conflicts weakened old boundaries without constructing new ones? This paper aims to answer this question by calculating the block-weighted cleavage salience index—a measure of cleavage importance in a party system that accounts for both cleavage size and stability—for the class, religious, regional, and transnational cleavages in 15 West European countries from 1950 to the present. This dataset will clarify the extent to which the transnational cleavage constitutes a new anchor in European party systems and enable a direct comparison with the cleavages generally considered to be in decline. In addition to presenting the dataset, this paper will present initial findings seeking to understand the variation in cleavage stability across Western Europe.