Restructuration of Partisan Politics and the Emergence of a New Cleavage Based on Values

Abstract

The cleavage concept is a very demanding concept that limits the possibilities of finding any new examples of cleavages. And, indeed, many authors, some of whom contributing to the present volume, mainly perceive a decline of cleavages, or at best a stabilization of old cleavages, but hardly anything new. However, new cleavages may be hard to find, because we look in the wrong places for their structural basis: it might just be that their value/normative element is contributing crucially to the structural closure of the groups involved – as it did in the case of religion previously. If we take such a possibility into account, several of the contributions to the present volume provide evidence for the emergence of a new value-based cleavage, which has mainly, albeit not exclusively, been driven by the challengers of the New Left and the new populist right.