ABSTRACT
The study of the relationship between social structure and party choice is a classic topic within political science and political sociology. Since the seminal essay of Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan on societal cleavage structures and party alignments was first published, it is a common place among political scientists that the West European party systems reflect social structure, particularly societal cleavages having emerged in the process of the modernization of European societies and persisted up to recent times. Accordingly, the huge variations in the structure of party competition all over Europe can be traced back to corresponding differences in the social structures. In their analysis of the development of the conflict structure in Western democracies, Lipset and Rokkan (1967b: 15–23) focused on the historical origins and the major conflicts between the political parties. They identified four central cleavages which had their anchorage in the social structure:
The centre–periphery cleavage was anchored in geographical regions and related to different ethnic and linguistic groups as well as religious minorities.
The conflict between the church and the state pitted the secular state against the historical privileges of the churches and over control of the important educational institutions. This cleavage has more specifically polarized the religious section against the secular section of the population.
The conflict in the commodity market was between buyers and sellers of agricultural products, or, more generally, between the urban and the rural population.
Finally, the conflict in the labour market involved owners and employers versus tenants, labourers and workers. This conflict is more generally referred to as the class cleavage.
During the last few decades, the influential analysis of Lipset and Rokkan has been challenged by two factors. In the ongoing process of societal modernization, the question was asked whether the cleavages which had been characteristic for the party systems of the industrial societies are still relevant to the emerging post-industrial societies. Moreover, the regime change in Central and Eastern Europe raised the question whether the linkages between social structure, electoral behaviour and party competition which were demonstrated by many empirical studies of Western Europe can also be observed in the new European democracies.