ABSTRACT
Introduction Despite more or less thirty years of close reading by countless scholars in a variety of different fields, and despite what is now a genuinely voluminous literature seeking to explore and often test the ramifications of the so-called “freezing hypothesis”, there still remains a marked degree of confusion about what precisely was believed by Lipset and Rokkan to have settled into place by the 1920s. On the one hand, the conclusion of the original authors (Lipset and Rokkan 1967a, 50) might be read as unequivocal, in that it was the “party systems” which had reflected a more or less unchanging history over the previous forty or so years, with their constituent “party alternatives” becoming “older than the majorities of the national electorates”. What appeared frozen, therefore, were the parties and the systems that they constituted. On the other hand, the principal burden of the rich and lengthy Lipset-Rokkan essay was not so much concerned with parties or even party systems as such, although this was certainly one of the recurring themes, but rather with cleavages and cleavage structures. Indeed, the subsequent continuity or freezing of the party systems into the 1960s was actually defined in terms of their still reflecting the original “cleavage structures” of the 1920s. Following this latter reading, what appears to have been frozen was the cleavage system, with the parties and party systems being simply the outward manifestation of that particular stasis.
