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Social cleavages and election results in Western Europe
To what extent do social cleavages continue to shape election results in Western Europe? By many accounts, it is too soon to proclaim the death of traditional social cleavages such as class and religion. Although social characteristics arguably exert a lesser impact upon voting behaviour today than in the past, the cross-national variations in such patterns make generalization difficult, if not impossible. Literature in this area is often fraught with ambiguity. While some suggest that the linkages between cleavage groups and their traditional parties are on the decline (Dalton et al., 1984; Franklin, 1985; Clark and Lipset, 1991; Franklin et al., 1992; Clark et al., 1993; Nieuwbeerta, 1996; Nieuwbeerta and Ultee, 1999; De Graaf et al., 2001; Knutsen, 2006), others view claims of cleavage decline with a heavy degree of scepticism and assert that cleavage structures remain mostly intact (e.g. Andersen, 1984; Evans, 1993, 1999; Brooks et al., 2006; Elff, 2007). The most recent evidence encourages us to recognize country-level differences in cleavage structures and their varying patterns of influence on voting behaviour (Brooks et al., 2006; Elff, 2007; see also Freire, 2006). As Elff (2007) argues, variations in the relationship between cleavage position and voting behaviour should be expected, since contextual features such as party programmes will affect individual incentives to vote in line with cleavage positions. Due to contextual features, the voting behaviour of traditional social cleavage groups is likely to vary cross-nationally, even if there is a tendency for this behaviour to be on the decline.
The findings outlined above should shape our current understanding of electoral politics in Western Europe only if our concern is the voting behaviour of cleavage groups; often it is not. Scholars of electoral politics often have broader concerns that relate to overall patterns of support for political parties, electoral volatility, party system fragmentation, or other forms of macro-level changes in the distribution of the vote. When aggregate electoral outcomes are of interest, accounts of cleavage-based voting behaviour are not enough to link the behaviour of cleavage group members to party vote shares. While these studies may tell us about the likelihood that certain types of voters...