Cleavage theory meets Europe’s crises: Lipset, Rokkan, and the transnational cleavage

ABSTRACT

This article argues that the perforation of national states by immigration, integration and trade may signify a critical juncture in the political development of Europe no less consequential for political parties and party systems than the previous junctures that Lipset and Rokkan detect in their classic article. We present evidence suggesting that (1) party systems are determined in episodic breaks from the past; (2) political parties are programmatically inflexible; and, (3) as a consequence, party system change comes in the form of rising parties.

KEYWORDS:

• Political parties
• cleavage
• European integration
• euro crisis
• elections
• immigration

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank David Attewell for research assistance. Earlier drafts were presented at a workshop, Theory Meets Crisis, organized by the authors at the Schuman Centre, European University Institute, 30 June–1 July 2016, at the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, 1–3 September 2016, at a conference, ‘Stein Rokkan’s Heritage to Contemporary Political Science: Understanding Representational and Policy-Making Challenges in Multi-Jurisdictional Polities,’ University of Bergen, 20–21 September 2016, the 26th PhD Summer School of the ECPR Standing Group on Political Parties at the University of Nottingham, 23 September 2016, and the Comparative Working Group at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, 18 October 2016. We thank participants at these events, and especially Jan Rovny and Frank Schimmelfennig, for comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Liesbet Hooghe is W.R. Kenan Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Robert Schuman Fellow, European University Institute, Florence.

Gary Marks is Burton Craige Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Robert Schuman Fellow, European University Institute, Florence.

Notes

1 We would like to thank David Attewell for research assistance. Earlier drafts were presented at a workshop, Theory Meets Crisis, organized by the authors at the Schuman Centre, European University Institute, 30 June–1 July 2016, at the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, 1–3 September 2016, at a conference, ‘Stein Rokkan’s Heritage to Contemporary Political Science: Understanding Representational and Policy-Making Challenges in Multi-Jurisdictional Polities,’ University of Bergen, 20–21 September 2016, the 26th PhD Summer School of the ECPR Standing Group on Political Parties at the University of Nottingham, 23 September 2016, and the Comparative Working Group at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, 18 October 2016. We thank participants at these events, and especially Jan Rovny and Frank Schimmelfennig, for comments and suggestions. This research was co-funded by the EUENGAGE HORIZON grant #649281 and by the Center for European Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. We also thank the Robert Schuman Centre, European University Institute, for hosting us as Fellows in June–July 2016 and for financing and hosting the conference ‘Theory Meets Crisis’ in June 2016, where a first draft of this paper was presented.

2 TAN refers to the tradition/authority/national pole of a cultural dimension with GAL (green/alternative/libertarian) at the opposite pole.

3 This has affinities with Marxism. Karl Marx regarded class consciousness as the outcome of collective struggle in which individuals would come to see their fate as bound to that of their class. Objective class location had to be activated in conflict before one could speak of class as a political category.

4 It is simply not possible, on strictly logical grounds, to identify a vote maximizing strategy for any party in a populated two-dimensional space (Laver and Sergenti 2012: 43).

5 Inglehart (1971: 992) detected a post-industrial cleavage in which a young, educated section of the middle class would realign on libertarian values and workers would be potential recruits for conservative parties. In his early formulation, Inglehart made the connection with internationalism:

[t]he libertarian position seems linked with internationalism. This follows from the fact that, according to our analysis, the post-bourgeois groups have attained security in regard to both the safety and sustenance needs; insofar as the nation-state is seen as a bulwark protecting the individual against foreign threats, it is less important to post-bourgeois respondents (1971: 997).

6 Access to higher education shapes a person’s life-long attitudes (Triventi 2013: 499). Controlling for socioeconomic status and attitudinal variables, Coffé and Voorposte (2010: 442) find that ‘young people whose parents vote for the SVP [Swiss People’s Party] are significantly more likely to support the SVP’. Longitudinal survey research suggests that attitudes underpinning right-wing extremism are rooted in early childhood, persist over a person’s life, and are transmitted inter-generationally. Analyzing 19 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), Avdeenko and Siedler (2015) find that a male whose parents express affinity toward a right-wing party is 13 per cent more likely to support a radical right party, controlling for income, education and unemployment.

7 In June 2010, these governments set up a limited liability company under Luxembourg law with 17 national shareholders to provide emergency loans to Greece, Ireland and Portugal. In September 2012, they set up an intergovernmental organization, the European Stability Mechanism, again in Luxembourg, this time under international law, to provide a financial firewall for distressed countries. As Schimmelfennig (2015: 179) notes, ‘asymmetrical interdependence resulted in a burden-sharing and institutional design that reflected German preferences and its allies predominantly’.

8 Kernel density estimation is a non-parametric method in which the data are treated as a randomized sample and the distribution is smoothened. We use Stata’s default, the Epanechnikov estimator, which selects a smoothing bandwidth of 0.123 for the two-wave kernel function and a bandwidth of 0.171 for the three-wave function.

9 Positioning on immigration is estimated on an 11-point scale ranging from ‘strongly opposes tough policy on immigration’ (0) to ‘strongly favors tough policy on immigration’ (10). For comparability, we rescale the variable 0 to 7, and reverse the scale so that a higher value indicates a pro-immigration stance.

10 This pattern is less pronounced in the communist periphery (the Baltic countries, Croatia and Slovenia), where the communist federation had protected ethnic minorities. As a result, the successor parties to the communist parties tend to be more open to multiculturalism and GAL values, while the nationalist agenda has been captured by mainstream right-wing parties (Rovny 2014a, 2014b).

11 Rohrschneider and Whitefield (2016: 142) note that in Central and Eastern Europe ‘party reputations are less strongly embedded in the electorate’. Cross-national variation in the ideological space is also greater (Rovny and Polk 2016; Savage 2014) and there is a larger role for non-ideological issues concerning corruption, good governance and populism. This has produced political parties combining moderate agendas on economic and sociocultural issues with a radical anti-establishment rhetoric (e.g., Res Publica in Estonia, New Era in Latvia, SMER in Slovakia and TOP09 in the Czech Republic). The phenomenon is described as ‘centrist populism’ (Pop-Eleches 2010) and ‘mainstream reformism’ (Hanley and Sikk 2016: 523).

12 In 2010, the salience of immigration for radical right parties in Eastern Europe is 6.56 on a 0 to 10 scale, compared to 9.40 in Western Europe.

13 The United Left was founded in 2014 by a group of activists inspired by Occupy Wall Street.

14 Though not in the United States for reasons explored in Lipset and Marks (2000).

15 These general patterns require refinement in comparative national and subnational analysis.

Additional information

Funding

This research was co-funded by the EUENGAGE HORIZON grant #649281 and by the Center for European Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. We also thank the Robert Schuman Centre, European University Institute, for hosting us as Fellows in June–July 2016 and for financing and hosting the conference ‘Theory Meets Crisis’ in June 2016, where a first draft of this article was presented.