Cleavage politics in the twenty-first century

Abstract

The concept of cleavages has made a profound impact on several political science sub-fields over the last 50 years. These cleavages – defined as the social divisions that determine a country’s political conflicts – have served as a device to study phenomena as diverse as voting behaviour, party system institutionalisation, as well as democratisation and state-building processes. This chapter reviews the classical ‘cleavage theory’ approach and the major conceptual, methodological and practical criticisms that it has received, as well as the primary responses to these criticisms. We then discuss recent scholarship on the emergence of new cleavages in Western Europe and beyond that have, above all, been argued to define the rise of challenger parties and, as such, revived the academic debate on cleavage politics while pointing to new directions for research.