Political Cleavages in the Basque Country: Meaning and Salience

Abstract

The Basque party system has typically been described as organized along two cross-cutting cleavages: a nationalist struggle and a less salient class conflict. While there is consensus on the nature of the nationalist division, what remains of the historical class cleavage is unclear. Two competing hypotheses on the nature of the class cleavage are put forward: the class cleavage has ‘realigned’ along the new social classes of post-industrial society, and the class cleavage is best understood as a ‘frozen’ cleavage. It is shown that the freezing hypothesis best captures the nature of the class cleavage in the Basque Country today, and that once ‘left’ and ‘right’ are understood along these lines, the nationalist cleavage becomes more salient.

Keywords:

• Basque Country
• class
• cleavages
• left–right
• nationalism
• voting behaviour

Notes

Bartolini and Mair (1991: 215) refer to “a set of values and beliefs that provides a sense of identity and role to the empirical element and reflects the self-awareness of the social group(s) involved” as the second element of a cleavage. This definition of the normative level strongly emphasizes its relation to the structural level. As the structural element in the case of the nationalist division is ethnic identity, Bartolini and Mair's definition is unable to grasp the distinction between ethnicity as structure and the political preferences that are relatively autonomous to it. It is more important (in our view) to emphasize the primarily social nature of the structural level to the political of the second level. Consequently, instead of referring to “values and beliefs” as the second level of a cleavage we refer to “values and preferences”. For a similar understanding of the division between the two dimensions of a cleavage regarding ethnic identity, see Kriesi et al. (2008: 6–9).

See the Euskobarometros, available at http://www.ehu.es/euskobarometro/.

Calculated from the Historical Data Series of the Statistical Office of the Basque Country (www.eustat.es). Share of industry workers does not include those occupied in construction.

Its historical acronym is HB (People's Unity). It has also been known as EH (We the Basques) or Batasuna (Unity). In 2005, it managed to present itself as EHAK (Communist Party of the Basque Homelands) at the Basque regional elections. In February 2011, Batasuna presented some new statutes, changing its name to ‘Sortu’ (to Create). Although Sortu was also illegalized, the Patriotic Left could participate in the municipal elections of 2011 through ‘Bildu’ (to Join), a coalition between independents close to Batasuna/Sortu, EA and ‘Alternatiba’ (Alternative, a small party schism of the United Left). At the end of 2011, the Basque Patriotic Left joined ‘Amaiur’ (the name of a place in Navarre), an electoral alliance between Bildu and Aralar formed for the Spanish elections of that year.

The responses to the following survey questions were used: “… where would you place yourself on the following scales? a) Maximum liberty of the markets vs. maximum control by the public sector, b) competition is good vs. competition is bad” (scale: 1–10). Then: “I'll present to you alternative forms of the organisation of the Spanish state. With which one do you agree most? a) Central state without autonomies; b) A state with autonomous communities as it is now; c) A federal state in which the regions have more autonomy than now; d) A state which recognizes the nationalities and the possibility to convert themselves in independent states". And, further: “Would you say that your desire for the independence of the Basque Country [“Euskadi”] is a) very strong; b) rather strong; c) rather weak; d) very weak; e) none?” And: “Could you tell me for which party you feel most sympathy or consider that this party is closest to your ideas?” As well as: “… on the following board there is a series of boxes which go from extreme left to extreme right. In which box would you place yourself?” (1–10). And, finally: “Could you tell me for which party you voted in the last elections of the Basque parliament in 2009?”

We made use of multiple imputation by chained equations on the basis of these four and additional two items that ask for an opinion concerning the electoral law that prohibits the participation of the parties considered by the courts to be conected to ETA, and the removal of pictures of ETA prisoners from public spaces. This way we lose only 49 out of 1200 cases due to missing values on questions concerning policy preferences.

For most datasets on the Basque Country it is not possible to measure left–right placements and policy preferences along all relevant policy dimensions. An exception is the Basque Version of the European Value Survey in 1999. We found that citizens' preferences can be distinguished along six dimensions, of which three (preferences concerning issues of the economy, religion and environment) were strongly related with left–right self-placement (the analyses are available from the authors on request). This observation further supports our argument that self-placement on the left–right scale cannot be interpreted entirely in terms of the class cleavage.