Theory Of Cleavage Theory

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The concept of cleavage plays an important role in the literature on party system formation and contemporary voting behavior studies, as Martin S. Lipset and Stein Rokkan have stated in their "cleavage theory". The definition of divide is divided by a sort of existence of demographics and stable or aligned attitudes and conflicts within the structure of society.
The general opinion is that voters do not come in predefined groups. Cleavage divides voters by two: lawyers and opponents on a certain subject, or vote for a certain party.
According to Lipset and Rokkan, modern party systems are defined by historical conflicts and the lasting identities created by the interaction of these conflicts and social institutions that can explain national …show more content…

In the second section, I will explain why cleavage theory can help us understand what has happened in the new democracies and some contemporary uses of the concept of cleavage in new democracies with the examples of Western European countries. At the end of the dissertation, I will examine the spatial scope of the model taking into account the recent evolutions as well as various aspects and the durability of the model.
There are different divisions in society, but Lipset-Rokkan has defined four fundamental cleavages for Western civilization. According to them, these divisions have determined the emergence and the content of many political parties, especially in Europe. With the emergence of two revolutions, the national revolution and the industrial revolution, different social divisions related to the division of parties and electoral behavior were …show more content…

Cleavages, institutions, voting systems and, to some extent, party organizations have combined to create a framework that reinforces the importance of how parties have chosen to compete. The competitive development of multi-party systems in Central and Eastern Europe was motivated by the conflict between parties to define the post-communist "right". Also in the European Union, the cleavage theory has defined the positioning of national political parties. Political parties have much more in common with parties of the same family than other parties in the same country. The reason for this is that parties are shaped by their distinct historical experiences, the most influential of which are the ideological propensities and constituency ties that derive from the basic divides that structure contention in a society. The differences between the different political parties on European integration can be explained by territorial differences in the historical interaction of the cleavages between countries and regions. In short, a theory of the cleavage of party positioning makes it possible to understand the variations within party families as well as the variations between

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