Cleavage Politics in Western Democracies

There is acute awareness that the structure of political conflict has shifted in Western democracies (e.g., Bornschier, 2010; Dalton, 2018; Hooghe et al., 2002; Jackson & Jolly, 2021; Kriesi et al., 2006). This work provides robust evidence of the rising salience of socio-cultural issues and, potentially, the emergence of a full-fledged electoral cleavage (De Vries & Hobolt, 2020), socio-structural foundations (Marks et al., 2022), and group identities (Bornschier et al. 2021; Zollinger 2022). However, the micro-foundations of this restructuring are less well understood. • Social foundation While education has been identified as the master variable on this divide (Abou-Chadi and Hix 2022; Stubager, 2009), what conditions its structuring potential and how does it relate to other social bases, e.g., gender, occupation, and location? • Grievances To what extent is a socio-cultural shift evidence of a cleavage rather than of issue divides on which voters have transient preferences (Häusermann et al. 2023)? • Group identities and party system change How are individuals cross-pressured across group identities, and how does this affect voting (Dassonneville 2023; Gidron et al. 2020)? How, in turn, do parties adapt to cross-pressured voters, and how does this bear on electoral coalition formation and party system restructuring (Hall et al. 2023)? This Workshop brings together scholars who use, revise, or reject a cleavage perspective in explaining the micro-foundations of the contemporary divide. The answers bear directly on how our societies respond to the crisis of Western democracy. We welcome Papers that use multi-method approaches.

1: What is the nature of the contemporary divide in Western politics?
2: How can one explain contemporary patterns of voting in Western democracies?
3: How can one explain contemporary patterns of identify formation?
4: What are the strengths and limitations of cleavage theory for explaining the contemporary political divide?
5: How does cleavage theory stack up against alternative theories, including spatial theory?

Title	Details
Oppositional identity politics: Towards a new concept	View Paper Details
The Conflict-of-Conflicts and Cleavage Stability in a Volatile Age	View Paper Details
How and why do women and men vote differently	View Paper Details
Cleavages in Eastern European Party Competition	View Paper Details
Rokkan meets data: traditional cleavages, their preconditions, and a dynamic model of cleavage electoral structuring	View Paper Details
The structure of West European Policy Spaces: A stable mismatch or increasing alignment between voters and parties?	View Paper Details
Cleavage Salience and the Territorial Distribution of Social Policy Competences	View Paper Details
The Generational Education Divide and the Transnational Cleavage	View Paper Details
Educational Networks, Social Closure, and Political Divides	View Paper Details
The (in)stability and determinants of voters’ issue salience from a longitudinal and comparative perspective	View Paper Details
Selective (Il)liberalism: How Positions are Selective on Multidimensional Group Identity Movers	View Paper Details
Socio-economic segregation and the new cleavage	View Paper Details
The left behind, latte liberals and democratic attitudes. Putting nuance to stereotypical expectations	View Paper Details
Subjects, attainment or selection? Disentangling the effect of schooling on political beliefs in adulthood	View Paper Details
Four Arenas of Inequality Conflicts	View Paper Details
Political divides between graduates educated in different fields of education	View Paper Details
Looking for the “ecological class”. The socio-structural foundations of the Ecology vs. Productivism cleavage in Western Europe.	View Paper Details
The Emergence of the Latent Educational Cleavage – A longue durée analysis	View Paper Details
A-peeling away the layers: Economic and cultural group appeals in Belgium	View Paper Details