Looking for the “ecological class”. The socio-structural foundations of the Ecology vs. Productivism cleavage in Western Europe.

The literature on the birth and rise of new cleavages in West-European party competition overwhelmingly subsume all (now old) “New Politics” issues into a single GAL-TAN dimension (Bornschier 2010; De Vries et Marks 2012; Ford et Jennings 2019). According to these views, and however the name given to the new cleavage, radical right and green parties are the two sides of the same coin. This paper starts by defending the ground assumption that West-European party systems have witnessed the development of two distinct yet partially correlated cleavages: the Identity vs. Cosmopolitism and the Ecology vs. Productivity cleavages. The first one has been largely studied in the literature, because radical right parties have received tremendous attention. This cleavage is a direct consequence of globalization – a critical juncture, in Lipset and Rokkan’s (1967) words. Ideologically, this new cleavage pits Identity, Nationalism and Order against Cosmopolitanism, Supra-nationalism and Libertarianism. Socio-demographically, it mobilises the “losers” of economic globalization (Kriesi et al. 2008; Martin 2018) and thrives on the educational divide. The second cleavage is less documented in the literature: it has led to the development of Green parties and, to a lesser extent, to other new leftwing parties (Frognier 2007; Persico 2014). Ideologically, this new cleavage opposes Ecology, Quality of Life and Sobriety to Growth, Competition and Technological development. While some of its roots lie in the 19th century (Audier 2017), it was not until the 1970s, in response to the “Great Acceleration” (McNeill et Engelke 2014) – the other critical juncture – that contemporary ecologism took off. The issues that are at the basis of this new conflict have mostly been thought of as cultural issues, although their strong economical dimension also affects the classical Owners vs. Workers cleavage. The paper hence briefly presents the first two Bartolini and Mair’s (1990) dimensions a cleavage, namely its ideological and organizational components, and shows to what extent these two dimensions differ from the Identity vs. Cosmopolitism cleavage. More importantly, this paper will focus on the socio-structural dimension of the new cleavage and will assess whether West European societies have witnessed the rise of a new “ecological class” (Latour et Schultz 2022), and shed light on the socio-demographical and political characteristics of citizens who belong to this “class”. It will use survey data (Eurobarometers, ISSP, EVS) in 12 West European countries, where the politicization of environmental issues has led to the development of stable pro-environmental civil society organizations and parties to assess the longitudinal and spatial factors of value change, and the geographical, social and political determinants of pro-environmental values and behavior This paper will tackle directly two of the main questions of the workshop, namely 1. What is the nature of the contemporary divide in Western politics?, and 2. What are the strengths and limitations of cleavage theory for explaining the contemporary political divide?