. . . . . [Text
omitted]
Most of the parties aspiring to
majority positions in the West are conglomerates of
groups differing on wide ranges of issues, but still
united in their greater hostility to their competitors in
the other camps. Conflicts and controversies can arise
out of a great variety of relationships in the social
structure, but only a few of these tend to polarize the
politics of any given system. There is a hierarchy of
cleavage bases in each system and these orders of
political primacy not only vary among polities, but also
tend to undergo changes over time. Such differences and
changes in the political weight of sociocultural
cleavages set fundamental problems for comparative
research: When is region, language, or ethnicity most
likely to prove polarizing? When will class take the
primacy and when will denominational commitments and
religious identities prove equally important cleavage
bases? Which sets of circumstances are most likely to
favour accommodations of such oppositions within parties
and in which circumstances are they more apt to
constitute issues between the parties? Which types of
alliances tend to maximize the strain on the polity and
which ones help to integrate it? Questions such as these
will be on the agenda of comparative political sociology
for years to come. There is no dearth of hypotheses, but
so far very little in the way of systematic analysis
across several systems. It has often been suggested that
systems will come under much heavier strain if the main
lines of cleavage are over morals and the nature of human
destiny than if they concern such mundane and negotiable
matters as the prices of commodities, the rights of
debtors and creditors, wages and profits, and the
ownership of property. However, this does not take us
very far; what we want to know is when the one type of
cleavage will prove more salient than the other, what
kind of alliances they have produced and what
consequences these constellations of forces have had for
consensus- building within the nation-state. We do not
pretend to find clear-cut answers, but we have tried to
move the analysis one step further. We shall start out
with a review of a variety of logically possible sources
of strains and oppositions in social structures and shall
then proceed to an inventory of the empirically extant
examples of political expressions of each set of
conflicts. We have not tried to present a comprehensive
scheme of analysis in this context but would like to
point to one possible line of approach.
Dimensions of Cleavage: A
Possible Model
Our suggestion is that the crucial
cleavages and their political expressions can be ordered
witin the two-dimensional space [shown in Fig. 9. 1
].
In this model the 1-g
[vertical] line represents a territorial
dimension of the national cleavage structure and the
a-i [horizontal] line a functional
dimension.
At the l end of the
territorial axis we would find strictly local oppositions
to encroachments of the aspiring or the dominant national
elites and their bureaucracies: the typical reactions of
peripheral regions, linguistic minorities, and culturally
threatened populations to the pressures of the
centralizing, standardizing, and 'rationalizing'
machinery of the nation-state. At the g end of the
axis we would find conflicts not between territorial
units within the system but over the control, the
organization, the goals, and the policy options of the
system as a whole. These might be nothing more than
direct struggles among competing elites for central
power, but they might also reflect deeper differences in
conceptions of nationhood, over domestic priorities and
over external strategies.
Conflicts along the a-i
axis cut across the territorial units of the
nation. They produce alliances of similarly situated or
similarly oriented subjects and households over wide
ranges of localities and tend to undermine the inherited
solidarity of the established territorial communities. At
the a end of this dimension we would find the
typical conflict over short-term or long-term allocations
of resources, products, and benefits in the economy:
conflicts between producers and buyers, between workers
and employers, between borrowers and lenders, between
tenants and owners, between contributors and
beneficiaries. At this end the alignments are specific
and the conflicts tend to be solved through rational
bargaining and the establishment of universalistic rules
of allocation. The farther we move toward the i
end of the axis, the more diffuse the criteria of
alignment, the more intensive the identification with the
'we' group, and the more uncompromising the rejection of
the 'they' group. At the i end of the
dimension we find the typical 'friend-foe' oppositions of
tight-knit religious or ideological movements to the
surrounding community. The conflict is no longer over
specific gains or losses but over conceptions of moral
right and over the interpretation of history and human
destiny; membership is no longer a matter of multiple
affiliation in many directions, but a diffuse '24-hour'
commitment incompatible with other ties within the
community; and communication is no longer kept flowing
freely over the cleavage lines but restricted and
regulated to protect the movement against impurities and
the seeds of compromise.
Historically documented cleavages
rarely fall at the poles of the two axes: a concrete
conflict is rarely exclusively territorial or exclusively
functional but will feed on strains in both directions.
The model essentially serves as a grid in the comparative
analysis of political systems: the task is to locate the
alliances behind given parties at given times within this
two-dimensional space. The axes are not easily
quantifiable, and they may not satisfy any criteria of
strict scalability; nevertheless, they seem heuristically
useful in attempts such as ours at linking up empirical
variations in political structures with current
conceptualizations in sociological theory.
. . . . . [Text
omitted]
The Two Revolutions: The
National and the Industrial
Territorial oppositions set limits
to the process of nation-building; pushed to their
extreme they lead to war, secession, possibly even
population transfers. Functional oppositions can only
develop after some initial consolidation of the national
territory. They emerge with increasing interaction and
communication across the localities and the regions, and
they spread through a process of 'social
mobilization'[6] The growing nation-state
developed a wide range of agencies of unification and
standardization and gradually penetrated the bastions of
I primordial' local culture. So did the organizations of
the Church, sometimes in close co-operation with the
secular administrators, often in opposition to and
competition with the officers of the state. And so did
the many autonomous agencies of economic development and
growth, the networks of traders and merchants, of bankers
and financiers, of artisans and industrial
entrepreneurs.
The early growth of the national
bureaucracy tended to produce essentially territorial
oppositions, but the subsequent widening of the scope of
governmental activities and the acceleration of cross
local interactions gradually made for much more complex
systems of alignments, some of them between localities,
and others across and within localities.
. . . . . [Text
omitted]
To account for the variations in
such constellations we have found it illuminating to
distinguish four critical lines of cleavage
[see Fig. 9.2]. Two of these cleavages are direct
products of what we might call the National
Revolution: the conflict between the central
nation-building culture and the increasing resistance
of the ethnically, linguistically, or religiously
distinct subject populations in the provinces and
the peripheries (#1 in Fig. 9.2): the conflict
between the centralizing, standardizing, and mobilizing
Nation-State and the historically established
corporate privileges of the Church
(#2).
Two of them are products of the
Industrial Revolution: the conflict between the
landed interests and the rising class of
industrial entrepreneurs (#3): the conflict
between owners and employers on the one side and
tenants, labourers, and workers on the other
(#4).
Much of the history of Europe
since the beginning of the nineteenth century can be
described in terms of the interaction between these two
processes of revolutionary change: the one triggered
in France and the other originating in Britain. Both had
consequences for the cleavage structure of each nation,
but the French Revolution produced the deepest and the
bitterest oppositions. The decisive battle came to stand
between the aspirations of the mobilizing nation-state
and the corporate claims of the churches. This was
far more than a matter of economics. It is true that the
status of church properties and the financing of
religious activities were the subjects of violent
controversy, but the fundamental issue was one of morals,
of the control of community norms. This found reflection
in fights over such matters as the solemnization of
marriage and the granting of divorces, the organization
of charities and the handling of deviants, the functions
of medical versus religious officers, and the
arrangements for funerals. However, the fundamental issue
between Church and State focused on the control of
education.
The Church, whether Roman Catholic,
Lutheran, or Reformed, had for centuries claimed the
right to represent man's 'spiritual estate' and to
control the education of children in the right faith. In
the Lutheran countries, steps were taken as early as in
the seventeenth century to enforce elementary education
in the vernacular for all children. The established
national churches simply became agents of the state and
had no reason to oppose such measures. In the religiously
mixed countries and in purely Catholic ones, however, the
ideas of the French Revolution proved highly divisive.
The development of compulsory education under centralized
secular control for all children of the nation came into
direct conflict with the established rights of the
religious pouvoirs intemidiaires and triggered
waves of mass mobilization into nationwide parties of
protest. To the radicals and liberals inspired by the
French Revolution, the introduction of compulsory
education was only one among several measures in a
systematic effort to create direct links of influence and
control between the nation-state and the individual
citizen, but their attempt to penetrate directly to the
children without consulting the parents and their
spiritual authorities aroused widespread opposition and
bitter fights.' [7]
The parties of religious defence
generated through this process grew into broad mass
movements after the introduction of manhood suffrage and
were able to claim the loyalties of remarkably high
proportions of the churchgoers in the working class.
These proportions increased even more, of course, as the
franchise was extended to women on a par with men.
Through a process very similar to the one to be described
for the Socialist parties, these church movements tended
to isolate their supporters from outside influence
through the development of a wide variety of parallel
organizations and agencies: they not only built up
schools and youth movements of their own, but also
developed confessionally distinct trade unions, sports
clubs, leisure associations, publishing houses, magazines
, newspapers, in one or two cases even radio and
television stations.
Perhaps the best example of
institutionalized segmentation is found in the
Netherlands; in fact, the Dutch word Verzuiling
has recently become a standard term for tendencies to
develop vertical networks (zuilen, columns or
pillars) of associations and institutions to ensure
maximum loyalty to each church and to protect the
supporters from cross-cutting communications and
pressures. Dutch society has for close to a century been
divided into three distinct subcultures: the
national-liberal secular, frequently referred to as the
algemene, the 'general' sector; the orthodox
Protestant column; and the Roman Catholic
column.
The symmetric representation of the
four basic cleavage lines in Fig. 9.2 refers to
average tendencies only and does not exclude wide
variations in location along the a-i axis.
Conflicts over the civic integration of recalcitrant
regional cultures (#1) or religious organizations (#2)
need not always lead to Verzuiling. An analysis of
the contrasts between Switzerland and the Netherlands
would tell us a great deal about differences in the
conditions for the development of pluralist insulation.
Conflicts between primary producers and the
urban-industrial interests have normally tended towards
the a pole of the axis, but there are many examples of
highly ideologized peasant oppositions to officials and
burghers. Conflicts between workers and employers have
always contained elements of economic bargaining, but
there have also often been strong elements of cultural
opposition and ideological insulation. Working-class
parties in opposition and without power have tended to be
more verzuild, more wrapped up in their own
distinct mythology, more insulated against the rest of
the society. By contrast the victorious Labour parties
have tended to become ontzuild, domesticated, more
open to influence from all segments within the national
society.
Similar variations will occur at a
wide range of points on the territorial axis of our
schema. In our initial discussion of the l pole we
gave examples of cultural and religious resistances to
the domination of the central national elite, but such
oppositions are not always purely territorial. The
movements may be completely dominant in their provincial
strongholds but may also find allies in the central areas
and thus contribute to the development of cross-local and
cross-regional fronts.
. . . . . [Text
omitted]
The National Revolution forced
ever-widening circles of the territorial population to
chose sides in conflicts over values and
cultural identities. The Industrial Revolution also
triggered a variety of cultural countermovements, but in
the longer run tended to cut across the value communities
within the nation and to force the enfranchised citizenry
to choose sides in terms of their economic
interests, their shares in the increased wealth
generated through the spread of the new technologies and
the widening markets.
In our a-g-i-1 paradigm we
have distinguished two types of such interest cleavages:
cleavages between rural and urban interests (#3) and
cleavages between worker and employer interests
(#4).
. . . . . [Text
omitted]
There was a hard core of economic
conflict in these oppositions, but what made them so deep
and bitter was the struggle for the maintenance of
acquired status and the recognition of achievement. In
England, the landed elite ruled the country, and the
rising class of industrial entrepreneurs, many of them
religiously at odds with the Established Church, for
decades aligned themselves in opposition both to defend
their economic interests and to assert their claims to
status. It would be a misunderstanding, says the
historian George Kitson Clark,[8] to think of
agriculture 'as an industry organized like any other
industry-primarily for the purposes of efficient
production. It was ... rather organized to ensure the
survival intact of a caste. The proprietors of the
great estates were not just very rich men whose capital
happened to be invested in land, they were rather the
life tenants of very considerable positions which it was
their duty to leave intact to their successors. In a way
it was the estate that mattered and not the holder of the
estate. . . .'The conflict between Conservatives and
Liberals reflected an opposition between two value
orientations: the recognition of status through
ascription and kin connections versus the claims
for status through achievement and
enterprise.
. . . . . [Text
omitted]
In other countries of the European
continent the rural-urban cleavage continued to assert
itself in national politics far into the twentieth
century, but the political expressions of the cleavage
varied widely. Much depended on the concentrations of
wealth and political control in the cities and on the
ownership structure in the rural economy. In the Low
Countries, France, Italy, and Spain, rural urban
cleavages rarely found direct expression in the
development of party oppositions. Other cleavages,
particularly between the state and the churches and
between owners and tenants, had greater impact on the
alignments of the electorates. By contrast, in the five
Nordic countries the cities had traditionally dominated
national political life, and the struggle for democracy
and parliamentary rule was triggered off through a broad
process of mobilization within the peasantry. This was
essentially an expression of protest against the central
elite of officials and patricians (a cleavage on the
1-g axis in our model), but there were also
elements of economic opposition in the movement: the
peasants felt exploited in their dealings with city folk
and wanted to shift the tax burdens to the expanding
urban economies. These economic cleavages became more and
more pronounced as the primary-producing communities
entered into the national money and market economy. The
result was the formation of a broad front of interest
organizations and co-operatives and the development of
distinctive Agrarian parties. Even after the rise of the
working-class parties to national dominance, these
Agrarian parties did not find it possible to establish
common fronts with the Conservative defenders of the
business community. The cultural contrasts between the
countryside and the cities were still strong, and the
strict market controls favoured by the Agrarians could
not easily be reconciled with the philosophy of free
competition espoused by many Conservatives.
The conflict between landed and
urban interests was centred in the commodity
market. The peasants wanted to sell their wares at the
best possible prices and to buy what they needed from the
industrial and urban producers at low cost. Such
conflicts did not invariably prove party-forming. They
could be dealt with within broad party fronts or could be
channelled through interest organizations into narrower
arenas of functional representation and bargaining.
Distinctly agrarian parties have only emerged where
strong cultural oppositions have deepened and embittered
the strictly economic conflicts.
Conflicts in the labour
market proved much more uniformly divisive. Working-class
parties emerged in every country of Europe in the wake of
the early waves of industrialization. The rising masses
of wage-earners, whether in large-scale farming, in
forestry, or in industry, resented their conditions of
work and the insecurity of their contracts, and many of
them felt socially and culturally alienated from the
owners and the employers. The result was the formation of
a variety of labour unions and the development of
nationwide Socialist parties. The success of such
movements depended on a variety of factors: the strength
of the paternalist traditions of ascriptive recognition
of the worker status, the size of the work unit and the
local ties of the workers, the level of prosperity and
the stability of employment in the given industry, and
the chances of improvements and promotion through loyal
devotion or through education and achievement.
. . . . . [Text
omitted]
. . . A number of attempts
were made to repress the unions and the Socialists, and
the working-class organizations consequently tended to
isolate themselves from the national culture and to
develop soziale Ghettoparteien,[10]
strongly ideological movements seeking to isolate their
members and their supporters from influences from the
encompassing social environments. In terms of our
paradigm, these parties were just as close to the i pole
as their opponents in the religious camp. This
'anti-system' orientation of large sections of the
European working class was brought to a climax in the
aftermath of the Russian Revolution. The Communist
movement did not just speak for an alienated stratum of
the territorial community but came to be seen as an
external conspiracy against the nation. These
developments brought a number of European countries to
the point of civil war in the twenties and the thirties.
The greater the numbers of citizens caught in such direct
'friend-foe' oppositions to each other the greater the
danger of total disruption of the body
politic.
Developments since World War II
have pointed towards a reduction of such pitched
oppositions and some softening of ideological tensions: a
movement from the i toward the a pole in our
paradigm.' [11] A variety of factors contributed
to this development: the experience of national co
operation during the war, the improvements in the
standard of living in the fifties, the rapid growth of a
'new middle class' bridging the gaps between the
traditional working class and the bourgeoisie. But the
most important factor was possibly the entrenchment of
the working-class parties in local and national
governmental structures and their consequent
'domestication' within the established system.
. . . . . [Text
omitted]
The
Transformation of Cleavage Structures into Party
Systems
Conditions
for the Channelling of Opposition
Thus far,
we have focused on the emergence of one cleavage at a
time and only incidentally concerned ourselves with
the growth of cleavage systems and their
translations into constellations of political parties.
But cleavages do not translate themselves into party
oppositions as a matter of course: there are
considerations of organizational and electoral strategy;
there is the weighing of pay~offs of alliances against
losses through split-offs; and there is the successive
narrowing of the 'mobilization market' through the time
sequences of organizational efforts. Here we enter into
an area of crucial concern in current theorizing and
research, an area of great fascination crying out for
detailed co-operative research. Very much needs to be
done in reanalysing the evidence for each national party
system and even more in exploring the possibilities of
fitting such findings into a wider framework of
developmental theory. We cannot hope to deal exhaustively
with such possibilities of comparison in this volume and
shall limit ourselves to a discussion of a few
characteristic developments and suggest a rough
typology.
How does a
socio-cultural conflict get translated into an opposition
between parties? To approach an understanding of the
variations in such processes of translation we have to
sift out a great deal of information about the
conditions for the expression of protest and the
representation of interests in each
society.
First, we
must know about the traditions of decision-making
in the polity: the prevalence of conciliar versus
autocratic procedures of central government, the rules
established for the handling of grievances and protests,
the measures taken to control or to protect political
associations, the freedom of communication, and the
organization of demonstrations.[13]
Second, we
must know about the channels for the expression and
mobilization of protest: Was there a system of
representation and if so how accessible were the
representatives, who had a right to choose them, and how
were they chosen? Was the conflict primarily expressed
through direct demonstrations, through strikes, sabotage,
or open violence, or could it be channelled through
regular elections and through pressures on legitimately
established representatives?
Third, we
need information about the opportunities, the
pay-offs, and the costs of alliances in the system:
How ready or reluctant were the old movements to broaden
their bases of support and how easy or difficult was
it for new movements to gain representation on
their own?
Fourth and
finally, we must know about the possibilities, the
implications, and the limitations of majority rule in
the system: What alliances would be most likely to bring
about majority control of the organs of representation
and how much influence could such majorities in fact
exert on the basic structuring of the institutions and
the allocations within the system?
The Four
Thresholds
These
series of questions suggest a sequence of thresholds
in the path of any movement pressing forward
new sets of demands within a political system.
First, the
threshold of legitimation: Are all protests
rejected as conspiratorial, or is there some recognition
of the right of petition, criticism, and
opposition?
Second, the
threshold of incorporation: Are all or most of the
supporters of the movement denied status as participants
in the choice of representatives or are they given
political citizenship rights on a par with their
opponents?
Third, the
threshold of representation: Must the new movement
join larger and older movements to ensure access to
representative organs or can it gain representation on
its own?
Fourth, the
threshold of majority power: Are there built-in
checks and counterforces against numerical majority rule
in the system or will a victory at the polls give a party
or an alliance power to bring about major structural
changes in the national system?
The early
comparative literature on the growth of parties and party
systems focused on the consequences of the lowering of
the two first thresholds: the emergence of parliamentary
opposition and a free press and the extension of the
franchise. Tocqueville and Ostrogorski, Weber and
Michels, all in their various ways, sought to gain
insight into that central institution of the modern
polity, the competitive mass party.[14] The later
literature, particularly since the t920s, changed its
focus to the third and the fourth threshold: the
consequences of the electoral system and the structure of
the decision-making arena for the formation and the
functioning of party systems. The fierce debates over the
pros and cons of electoral systems stimulated a great
variety of efforts at comparative analysis, but the heavy
emotional commitments on the one or the other side often
led to questionable interpretations of the data and to
overhasty generalizations from meagre evidence. Few of
the writers could content themselves with comparisons of
sequences of change in different countries. They wanted
to influence the future course of events, and they tended
to be highly optimistic about the possibilities of
bringing about changes in established party systems
through electoral engineering. What they tended to forget
was that parties once established develop their own
internal structure and build up long-term commitments
among core supporters. The electoral arrangements may
prevent or delay the formation of a party, but once it
has been established and entrenched, it will prove
difficult to change its character simply through
variations in the conditions of electoral aggregation. In
fact, in most cases it makes little sense to treat
electoral systems as independent variables and party
systems as dependent. The party strategists will
generally have decisive influence on electoral
legislation and opt for the systems of aggregation most
likely to consolidate their position, whether through
increases in their representation, through the
strengthening of the preferred alliances, or through
safeguards against splinter movements. In abstract
theoretical terms it may well make sense to hypothesize
that simple majority systems will produce two-party
oppositions within the culturally more homogeneous areas
of a polity and only generate further parties through
territorial cleavages, but the only convincing evidence
of such a generalization comes from countries with a
continuous history of simple majority aggregations from
the beginnings of democratic mass politics. There is
little hard evidence and much uncertainty about the
effects of later changes in election laws on the
national party system: one simple reason is that the
parties already entrenched in the polity will exert a
great deal of influence on the extent and the direction
of any such changes and at least prove reluctant to see
themselves voted out of existence.
Any attempt
at systematic analysis of variations in the conditions
and the strategies of party competition must start out
from such differentiations of developmental phases. We
cannot, in this context, proceed to detailed
country-by-country comparisons but have to limit
ourselves to a review of evidence for two distinct
sequences of change: the rise of lower-class
movements and parties and the decline of
régime censitaire parties.
The
Rules of the Electoral Game
The early
electoral systems all set a high threshold for rising
parties. It was everywhere very difficult for
working-class movements to gain representation on their
own, but there were significant variations in the
openness of the systems to pressures from the new strata.
The second ballot systems so well known from the
Wilbelmine Reich and from the Third and the Fifth French
Republics set the highest possible barrier, absolute
majority, but at the same time made possible a variety
of local alliances among the opponents of the
Socialists: the system kept the new entrants
underrepresented, yet did not force the old parties to
merge or to ally themselves nationally. The blatant
injustices of the electoral system added further to the
alienation of the working classes from the national
institutions and generated what Giovanni Sartori has
described as systems of 'centrifugal pluralism':
[15]
Simple-majority
systems of the British-American type also set high
barriers against rising movements of new entrants into
the political arena; however, the initial level is not
standardized at 50 per cent of the votes cast in each
constituency but varies from the outset with the
strategies adopted by the established parties. If
they join together. in defence of their common interests,
the threshold is high; if each competes on its own, it is
low. In the early phases of working-class mobilization,
these systems have encouraged alliances of the 'Lib-Lab'
type.
.
. . . . [Text omitted]
This brings
us to a crucial point in our discussion of the
translation of cleavage structure into party systems:
the costs and the pay-offs of mergers, alliances, and
coalitions. The height of the representation
threshold and the rules of central decision- making may
increase or decrease the net returns ofjoint action, but
the intensity of inherited hostilities and the openness
of communications across the cleavage lines will decide
whether mergers or alliances are actually workable. There
must be some minimum of trust among the leaders, and
there must be some justification for expecting that the
channels to the decision- makers will be kept open
whoever wins the election. The British electoral system
can only be understood against the background of the
long-established traditions of territorial
representation; the NIP represents all his
constituents, not just those who voted him in. But this
system makes heavy demands on the loyalty of the
constituents: in two-party contests up to 49 per cent of
them may have to abide by the decisions of a
representative they did not want; in three-cornered
fights, as much as 66 per cent.
Such
demands are bound to produce strains in ethnically
culturally, or religiously divided communities: the
deeper the cleavages the less the likelihood of loyal
acceptance ofdecisions by representatives of the other
side. It was no accident that the
Four
Decisive Dimensions of Opposition
This review
of the conditions for the translation of sociocultural
cleavages into political oppositions suggests three
conclusions.
First, the
constitutive contrasts in the national system of party
constellations generally tended to manifest themselves
before any lowering of the threshold of
representation. The decisive sequences of party formation
took place at the early stage of competitive politics, in
some cases well before the extension of the franchise, in
other cases on the very eve of the rush to mobilize the
finally enfranchised masses.
Second, the
high thresholds of representation during the phase of
mass politicization set severe tests for the rising
political organizations. The surviving formations tended
to be firmly entrenched in the inherited social structure
and could not easily be dislodged through changes in the
rules of the electoral game.
Third, the
decisive moves to lower the threshold of representation
reflected divisions among the established
régime censitaire parties rather than
pressures from the new mass movements. The introduction
of PR added a few additional splinters but essentially
served to ensure the separate survival of parties unable
to come together in common defence against the rising
contenders of majority power.
What
happened at the decisive party-forming phase in each
national society? Which of the many contrasts and
conflicts were translated into party oppositions, and how
were these oppositions built into stable
systems?
This is not
the place to enter into detailed comparisons of
developmental sequences nation by nation. Our task is to
suggest a framework for the explanation of variations in
cleavage bases and party constellations.
. . .
. . [Text omitted]
The
decisive contrasts among the Western party systems
clearly reflect differences in the national histories
of conflict and compromise across the first three of the
four cleavage lines distinguished in our analytical
schema: the 'centre-periphery', the State-Church, and the
land-industry cleavages generated national developments
in divergent directions, while the owner-worker
cleavage tended to bring the party systems closer to
each other in their basic structure. The crucial
differences among the party systems emerged in the early
phases of competitive politics, before the final phase of
mass mobilization. They reflected basic contrasts in the
conditions and sequences of nation- building and in the
structure of the economy at the point.of take-off towards
sustained growth. This, to be sure, does not mean that
the systems vary exclusively on the 'Right' and at the
centre, but are much more alike on the 'Left' of the
political spectrum. There are working-class movements
throughout the West, but they differ conspicuously in
size, in cohesion in ideological orientation, and in the
extent of their integration into, or alienation from, the
historically given national policy. Our point is simply
that the factors generating these differences on the left
are secondary. The decisive contrasts among the
systems had emerged before the entry of the working-class
parties into the political arena, and the character of
these mass parties was heavily influenced by the
constellations of ideologies, movements, and
organizations they had to confront in that
arena.
A Model
in Three Steps
To
understand the differences among the Western party
systems we have to start out from an analysis of the
situation of the active nation-building lute on the
eve of the breakthrough to democratization and mass
mobilization: What had they achieved and where had
they met most resistance? What were their resources, who
were their nearest allies, and where could they hope to
find further support? Who were their enemies, what were
their resources, and where could they recruit allies and
rally reinforcement?
Any attempt
at comparative analysis across so many divergent national
histories is fraught with grave risks. It is easy to get
lost in the wealth of fascinating detail, and it is
equally easy to succumb to facile generalities and
irresponsible abstractions. Scholarly prudence prompts us
to proceed case by case, but intellectual impatience
urges us to go beyond the analysis of concrete contrasts
and try out alternative schemes of systematization across
the known cases.
To clarify
the logic of our approach to the comparative analysis of
party systems, we have developed a model of
alternative alliances and oppositions. We have
posited several sets of actors, have set up a series of
rules of alliance and opposition among these, and have
tested the resultant typology of potential party systems
against a range of empirically known cases.
Our model
seeks to reduce the bewildering variety of empirical
party systems to a set of ordered consequences of
decisions and developments at three crucial junctures in
the history of each nation:
first,
during the Reformation--the struggle for the
control of the ecclesiastical organizations within the
national territory;
second,
in the wake of the 'Democratic Revolution'
after 1789--the conflict over the control of the
vast machineries of mass education to be built up by
the mobilizing nation-states;
finally,
during the early phases of the Industrial
Revolution--the opposition between landed
interests and the claims of the rising commercial and
industrial leadership in cities and towns.
Our eight
types of alliance-opposition structure are in fact the
simple combinatorial products of three successive
dichotomies [see Fig. 9.3]. The model spells out
the consequences of the fateful division of Europe
brought about through Reformation and the
Counter-Reformation. The outcomes of the early struggles
between State and Church determined the structure of
national politics in the era of democratization and mass
mobilization three hundred years later. In Southern and
Central Europe the Counter-Reformation had consolidated
the position of the Church and tied its fate to the
priviliged bodies of the ancien régime. The
result was a polarization of politics between a
national-radical-secular movement and a
Catholic-traditionalists one.
|
|
FIRST DICHOTOMY: THE
REFORMATION
|
|
|
I--IV
|
V--VIII
|
|
|
State Controls
|
State Allied to
|
|
|
National Church
|
Roman Catholic Church
|
|
|
SECOND DICHOTOMY: THE DEMOCRATIC
REVOLUTION'
|
|
|
I--Il
|
III--IV
|
V--VI
|
VII-- VIII
|
|
|
National Church
|
Strong Roman
|
Secularizing
|
State Allied to
|
|
|
Dominant
|
Minority
|
Revolution
|
Roman Church
|
|
|
THIRD DICHOTOMY. THE INDUSTRIAL
REVOLUTION
|
|
|
Commitment to
|
Commitment to
|
Commitment to
|
Commitment to
|
|
|
Landed
|
Urban
|
Landed
|
Urban
|
Landed
|
Urban
|
Landed
|
Urban
|
|
|
Interests
|
Interests
|
Interests
|
Interests
|
|
Type:
|
I
|
II
|
III
|
IV
|
V
|
VI
|
VII
|
VIII
|
|
FIG. 9.3
|
Implications
for Comparative Political Sociology
We have
pushed our attempt at a systematization of the
comparative history of partisan oppositions in European
polities up to some point in the 1920s, to the
freezing of the major party alternatives in the
wake of the extension of the suffrage and the
mobilization of major sections of the new reservoirs of
potential supporters. Why stop there? Why not pursue this
exercise in comparative cleavage analysis right up to the
1960s? The reason is deceptively simple: the party
systems of the 1960s reflect, with few but significant
exceptions, the cleavage structures of the 1920s.
This is a crucial characteristic of Western
competitive politics in the age of 'high mass
consumption': the party alternatives, and in
remarkably many cases the party organizations, are older
than the majorities of the national
electorates. To most of the citizens of
the West. the currently active parties have been part of
the political landscape since their childhood or at least
since they were first faced with the choice between
alternative 'packages' on election day.
This
continuity is often taken as a matter of course; in fact
it poses an intriguing set of problems for comparative
sociological research. An amazing number of the parties
which had established themselves by the end of World War
I survived not only the onslaughts of Fascism and
National Socialism but also another world war and a
series of profound changes in the social and cultural
structure of the polities they were part of. How was this
possible? How were these parties able to survive so many
changes in the political, social, and economic conditions
of their operation? How could they keep such large bodies
of citizens identifying with them over such long periods
of time, and how could they renew their core clienteles
from generation to generation?
There is no
straightforward answer to any of these questions. We know
much less about the internal management and the
organizational functioning of political parties than we
do about their socio-cultural base and their external
history of participation in public
decision-making.
.
. . . . [Text omitted]
NOTES
1. W. Chambers, Parties in a New
Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963),
80-2.
2. R. Schachter, "Single-Party
Systems in West Africa," American Political Science
Review, 55 (1961), 301-
3. For a general analysis of this
process, see S. M. Lipset et al., Union Democracy
(New York: Free Press, 1956), 268-9.
4. E. A. Ross, The Principles of
Sociology (New York: Century, 1920), 164-5; G.
Simmel, Soziologie (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot,
1923 and 1958), ch. 4. See the translation in Conflict
and the Web of Group Affiliates (New York: Free
Press, 1964).
5. Lewis Namier, England in the
Age of the American Revolution (London: Macmillan,
1930), quoted from the 2nd edn. (1961) 183.
6. For a definition of this concept
and a specification of possible indicators, see Karl
Deutsch, 'Social Mobilization and Political Development',
American Political Science Review, 55 (196 1),
493-514.
7. For an analysis of the steps in
the extension of citizenship rights and duties to all
accountable adults, see S. Rokkan, 'Mass Suffrage, Secret
Voting and Political Participation', Archives Europiennes
de Sociologie, 2 (196l), 132-52, and the chapter by R.
Bendix and S. Rokkan, 'The Extension of Citizenship to
the Lower Classes', in R. Bendix, Nation-Building and
Citizenship (New York: Wiley, 1964).
8. G. K. Clark, The Making of
Victorian England (London: Methuen, 1962), 2 18 (our
italics).
9. J. Cornford, 'The Transformation
of Conservatism in the Late 19th Century', Victorian
Studies, 7 (1963), 35-66.
10. This is the phrase used by
Ernest Fraenkel, 'Pariament und oeffentliche Meinung',
in Zur Geschichte und Problematik der Demokratie:
Festgabe fuer H. Herzfeld (Berlin:
Duncker & Humbolt, 1958), 178.
11. One of the first political
analysts to call attention to these developments was
Herbert Tingsten, then editor-in-chief of the leading
Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter. See his
autobiography, Milt Liv (Tidningen (Stockholm:
Norstedts, 1963). For further details see S. M. Lipset,
'The Changing Class Structure and Contemporary European
Politics', Daedalus, 93 (1964), 271-
303.
12. Erik Allardt, 'Patterns of
Class Conflict and Working Class Consciousness in Finnish
Politics', in E. Allardt and Y. Littunen (eds.),
Cleavages, Ideologies and Par!y Systems (Helsinki:
Westermarck Society, 1964), 97-131.
13. In a
recent review of West European developments Hans Daalder
has argued this point with great force. It is impossible
to understand the development, structure, and operation
ofparty systems without a study of the extent of elite
competition before the industrial and the
democratic revolutlons. He singles out Britain, the Low
Countries, Switzerland, and Sweden as the countries with
the strongest traditions of conciliar pluralism and
points to the consequences of these preconditions for the
development of integrated party systems. See H. Daalder,
Parties, Elites, and Political Developments in Western
Europe', in J. LaPalombara and M. Weiner (eds.),
Political Parties and Potilical Development
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966). For a
fuller discussion of the contrasts in the character of
the nation-building process, see S. P. Huntington,
'Political Modernization: America vs. Europe', World
Politics, 18 (1966), 378--414.
14. For a
review of this literature, see S. M. Lipset,
'Introduction: Ostrogorski and the Analytical Approach to
the Comparative Study of Political Parties', in M. I.
Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Organization of
Political Parties (abridged edn.; New York:
Doubleday, 1964), pp. ix--lxv.