By Simon Bornschier
The appeal of the cleavage concept lies in its capacity to link individual political behavior to large-scale divisions in society by conceiving of individuals as members of various social groups. Because the Lipset-Rokkan model was developed to explain the configuration of party systems in Western Europe, it cannot be directly applied to other contexts. To make the cleavage approach travel to other contexts, it needs to be adapted in at least two ways: For one thing, the approach needs to be contextualized to account for critical junctures that are often different from the national and industrial revolutions witnessed in Western Europe. More fundamentally, this requires a shift from macro-historical sociology and a concern with similarities and differences between societies and their party systems to a more actor-centered perspective that acknowledges that critical junctures may afford elites considerable leeway to shape political cleavages.
The first part of this chapter seeks to contribute to theorizing the role of elite agency in the politicization of social divides and their translation into party systems. Specifically, it lays out key conditions under which elite agency increases. It takes as a point of departure the undisputed importance of elite strategy in situations when cleavages are cross-cutting, a common scenario in developing and advanced democracies alike. It then moves on to discussing how new and old democracies differ by addressing the interplay between mobilization from below and elite strategic action. In most new democracies, large-scale processes of social change and suffrage expansion (democratization) were less intimately related than was the case in the old democracies. Second, elites are also afforded more leeway in new democracies due to the frequent restrictions on political pluralism and party competition. I demonstrate that this can have profound implications with regard to the quality of substantive representation. Finally, I address the process in which cleavages are reproduced over generations, and how prior democratic experiences shape the degree to which redemocratization constitutes a critical juncture in its own right, or merely reproduces earlier mass–elite configurations.
The empirical part of the chapter substantiates some of these theoretical claims by analyzing the mobilization of the economic cleavage in South America in the first decades of the twentieth century. Often noted as a region whose party development sequence most closely resembles that of Western Europe, South America can be distinguished from other non-Western regions by its early decolonization experience in the early nineteenth century, and the emergence of working-class organization in the early twentieth century. The empirical analysis consists of paired comparisons with the intent to illustrate the range of possible outcomes when parties have substantial autonomy from society in defining their policy stances. For example, elite parties played the predominant role in mobilizing left-leaning voters in Uruguay and Colombia, pulling them into a coalition with the middle class. The Colorados in Uruguay maintained their course and were able to retain this constituency, while the Liberals in Colombia colluded with their former archenemies after a civil war, leaving left-wing voters without representation. Similarly, the comparison between the Argentine Peronists and Peru’s American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA) again underlines that party leaders unconstrained by strong party organizations may in some cases remain congruent with their constituents, and in others abandon them. Finally, both the Venezuelan and the Colombian cases demonstrate that elite pacts intended to restore democracy after interruptions of democratic rule can put the party system on the track of growing mass–elite divergence, because these pacts often restrict open competition. In Venezuela, this arguably and eventually paved the way for the emergence of Chavismo.
This chapter builds upon and extends an earlier attempt I made to theorize differences in cleavage politics in old and new democracies. In conceptual terms, it specifies why elites have greater leeway in shaping cleavages from above in new democracies than they did in the old democracies. Empirically, it adds more flesh to the bone based on three focused comparisons explaining the divergent trajectories of party systems and their capacity to represent voters’ substantive policy preferences in 20th Century South America.
The chapter is part of a book that theorizes and charts mass-elite discrepancies and their implications for substantive representation in a global perspective (Link to Open Access version of the book at University of Michigan Press).
Published:
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2024
Online available:
www.fulcrum.org