ability and security of income and wealth holdings are connected closely to
matters such as educational chances, consumption and saving habits, access to
jobs and religious behaviour. Even accent and dress style correlate deeply with
economic position in Western society. (See alsonew class.)
Cleavage
Cleavage, or ‘social cleavage’, is a vital concept in much political science
analysis, especially in relation to voting behaviour or the formation and
working of party systems. It designates a division between groups within a
society, based on some more or less fixed attribute: one can have cleavages
along lines ofclass, religion, language, race or even, conceivably, sex. The
patterns of social cleavages, their interrelationship, salience, number and
nature, used to determine the battle lines of competitive politics and generally
influence the stability and functioning of the political system. To a large extent
this sort of patterning is still crucial, despite an overall tendency towards
dealignment in many societies. In origin at least, most political parties
represent a given side as defined by one or more cleavage lines, and are likely
to be opposed by parties representing the other side or sides. If the politics of a
society are based on certain kinds of cleavage patterns, political life is likely to
be more violent, and government less competent, than if other cleavages
dominate. For example, racial or religious cleavages, if at all strong, are much
harder to manage by bargaining and compromise than class cleavages, because
they tend to produce absolute demands. The interrelationship between
cleavages can also be vitally important. If they reinforce each other, so that
two people who are opposed along one cleavage are likely also to be opposed
along a second, the temperature of political conflict is likely to be high. Where
one finds ‘cross-cutting’ cleavages—where, for example, opponents on reli-
gious issues are likely to find themselves on the same side when the issue is
language—intense conflict may well be avoided. One reason why the politics
of language in Belgium causes such stress, and parliamentary instability, is that
the Flemish–Walloon cleavage largely coincides with Catholic–anti-clerical
and economic cleavages. By contrast, Italy’s survival during the extremely
difficult post-war years may have been due partly to the fact that the vital class
cleavage in the country did not correspond very closely to the religious–secular
cleavage. The Catholic ruling party, the Christian Democrats (seeChristian
democracy), attracted many working-class votes that would probably other-
wise have gone to the communists or socialists, while many middle-class voters
who rebelled against clerical control in politics were led to vote for left-wing
parties. The decline of one of these cleavages, religion, contributed to the
collapse of the Italian party system in the early 1990s; the resulting unstable
party coalitions are due to the absence of a well-structured cleavage system.
Cleavage