Cleavages, Party And Electoral Systems Systems

Front 1

Cleavages

Back 1

Conflicting social divisions, deep separations

Front 2

Key Cleavages, the Two Revolutions

Back 2

National:
Conflict between nation building culture and resistance of ethnically, religiously, and linguistically diverse, distinct citizen populations.
Conflict between the centralizing Nation State and the Church
Industrial:
Conflict between the landed aristocracy and the industrial middle class
Conflict betweenn owners/employers and workers

Front 3

Political Party

Back 3

A group of people that includes those who hold office and those who help them get there

Front 4

Party Identification

Back 4

An attachement to a party that helps citizens locate themselves on the political landscape

Front 5

Cleavage Structures and Party Systems

Back 5

Parties help to make clear the divides and conflicting interests, they force citizens to set up priorities and choose sides.

Front 6

Lipset and Rokkan's Freezing Hypothesis

Back 6

The party systems of the 1960s reflected the cleavage strutures of the 1920s.
Social structures might change, but there was no longer any untapped electoral base to be mobilised into new parties after universal suffrage in the 1920s.
Consequently, political positions associated with new cleavages would go unrepresented or existing parties would adapt their positions to capture unrepresented voters.

Front 7

Post-Materialism

Back 7

Challenges the freezing hypothesis.
Ingleheart: new parties are a response to a value shift in advanced industrial democracies from 'materialist' to 'post-materialist' values.
Response to the decline of impact of traditional cleavages and emergence of new post- material values cleavage.
New generation voters brought up in affluence more concerned with issues relating to gender, racial and sexual freedom and equality
The change is slow and silent, follows inter-generational replacement.
But with the economic crisis will people start focusing on the material values instead?

Front 8

Attibutes and Identity categories

Back 8

An attribute is a characterstic that qualifies an individual for membership in an identity category

An identity category is a social group in which an individual can place themselves

Front 9

Elections and Clevages

Back 9

Each country has a certain set of latent cleavages that is determined by its distribution of individual attributes. Which latent cleavages become politicised is influenced by the electoral system in that country.

Front 10

Mechanical effect of Electoral Laws

Back 10

The way votes are translated into seats.
SMDs exaggerate the strength of the main parties as their percentage of seats ends up being greater than their percentage of the vote
PR distibutes seats accurately according to percentage of votes- easier for smaller parties to win seats and gain representation

Front 11

Psychological effects of Electoral laws

Back 11

How the mechanical effects influences voter behaviour.
It results in citizens voting strategically for their most preferred candidate who has the most realistic chance of winning.
It also results in strategic entry: where political elites make the decision of whether to enter the political arena under the label of their most preferred party or under the label of a party which has a realistic chance of winning.

Front 12

Combination of Mechanical and Pychological Effects

Back 12

Affects the size of party systems: mechanical effects limit the number of parties entering parliament in SMDs, stratgic entry and tactical voting further reduces party numbers. Overall SMDs suppress the number of -parties, whereas PR systems ar more permissive.

Front 13

Duverger's Theory

Back 13

Duverger states that the size of a country's party system depends on the the electoral institution but also the social forces at work.
Cleavages create the demand for political parties and electoral institutions then determine the extent to which this demand is translated into parties that win votes and parties that win seats.

Front 14

Duverger's Law

Back 14

Single-member district plurality systems encourage two party systems

Front 15

Duverger's Hypothesis

Back 15

Proportional representation electoral rules favour multiparty systems.

Front 16

Cleavages, Parties and Electoral Systems

Back 16

Cleavages shape the potential platforms of conflict, electoral systems determine how many parties can materialise.
Multiple cleavages lead to many parties only if the electoral system is permissive.
SMDs limit the number of cleavages that can be politicised.