30210

SoSe 17: Social and political cleavages in Europe

Marta Kozlowska

Hinweise für Studierende

Requirements Regular and active participation, reading the texts plus one oral presentation Exam (pass/fail) Seminar paper (3,000 words) or 3 response papers (à 1,000 words), or an oral exam. Schließen

Kommentar

Cleavage theory (Lipset and Rokkan 1967) is the most influential theoretical approach to social divisions of Western democracies of the 20th century. A cleavage is a: deep and persistent difference of political opinion and behaviour within a polity, most commonly along lines of class, religion, language, nationality, ethnicity, and/or gender (Calhoun 2002: 72). There were four initial cleavages in the Western Europe: (1) owner vs. worker (class), (2) state vs. church, (3) centre vs. periphery, and (4) land vs. industry, as identified by Lipset and Rokkan (1967).Until today they are the basis for the Left/Right division. Until the late 1960s/early 1970s the cleavages were considered ‘frozen’ in Western Europe. However, after that the conflict lines started to open up, as a result of social and political transformations (e.g. the decline of employment in agriculture and industry, development of the services sector; raise of ‘new’ middle class (cognitariat), increase in education levels, urbanisation, secularization, decolonisation, information revolution (and Internet), fall of the Eastern bloc, global economic deregulation, immigration). In result, the New Social Movements and the New Left (including the Greens) emerged, and the New Right followed from the 1980s on. The course provides an introduction to the theory of social cleavages, the classic studies in the field, as well as an overview of its recent developments. Especially, we will focus on the emergence of new conflict lines in Europe, from the emergence of values-based and educational cleavages in the Western Europe to the application of the cleavage theory to the post-communist societies in Central Europe. We will learn about the two-dimensional models of political orientations and their empirical applications to European societies. We will look at the cleavages from perspectives of three social actors: voting behavior of the masses, social movements, and the political parties. Finally, we will discuss the emergence of the far-right movements and parties in Europe and learn if the theory helps us understand the process. Schließen

Literaturhinweise

Inglehart 1984 Inglehart, R. (1984) ‘The Changing Structure of Political Cleavages in Western Society’, in R. Dalton, S. C. Flanagan and P. E. Beck (eds) Electoral Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies: Realignment or Dealignment?: 25–69. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kriesi, Hanspeter, Edgar Grande, Martin Dolezal, Marc Helbling, Dominic Höglinger, Swen Hutter and Bruno Wueest 2012. Political conflict in Western Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kriesi, Hanspeter, Edgar Grande, Romain Lachat, Martin Dolezal, Simon Bornschier, Timotheos Frey 2008. West European Politics in the Age of Globalization. Cambridge University Press. Lipset, Seymour M., and Stein Rokkan. 1967. Cleavage Structures, Party Systems and Voter Alignments: An Introduction. In Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross National Perspectives, edited by Seymour M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan, 1–64. New York: Free Press. Schließen

14 Termine

Regelmäßige Termine der Lehrveranstaltung

Mi, 14:00 - 16:00 14 Termine

Mi, 19.04.2017 14:00 - 16:00

Dozenten:
Marta Kozlowska