9. CLEAVAGE STRUCTURES, PARTY SYSTEMS, AND VOTER ALIGNMENTS (1 of 2)

SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET AND STEIN ROKKAN

 

Whatever the structure of the polity, parties have served as essential agencies of mobilization and as such have helped to integrate local communities into the nation or the broader federation. This was true of the earliest competitive party systems, and it is eminently true of the single-party nations of the post-colonial era. In his insightful analysis of the formation of the American party system, William Chambers has assembled a wide range of indications of the integrative role of the first national parties, the Federalists and the DemocraticRepublicans: they were the first genuinely national organizations; they represented the first successful efforts to pull Americans out of their local community and their state and to give them roles in the national polity. Analyses of parties in the new nations of the twentieth century arrive at similar conclusions. Ruth Schachter has shown how the African singleparty organizations have been used by the political leaders to awaken a wider national sense of community and to create ties of communication and co-operation across territorial and ethnic populations.

 

In competitive party systems this process of integration can be analysed at two levels: on the one hand, each party establishes a network of cross-local communication channels and in that way helps to strengthen national identities; on the other, its very competitiveness helps to set the national system of government above any particular set of office-holders. This cuts both ways: the citizens are encouraged to distinguish between their loyalty to the total political system and their attitudes to the sets of competing politicians, and the contenders for power will, at least if they have some chance of gaining office, have some interest in maintaining this attachment of all citizens to the polity and its rules of alternation. In a monolithic polity citizens are not encouraged to distinguish between the system and current office-holders. The citizenry tends to identify the polity with the policies of particular leaders, and the power-holders habitually exploit the established national loyalties to rally support for themselves. In such societies any attack on the political leaders or on the dominant party tends to turn into an attack on the political system itself. Quarrels over particular policies or particular incumbencies immediately raise fundamental issues of system survival. In a competitive party system opponents of the current governing team may well be accused of weakening the state or betraying the traditions of the nation, but the continued existence of the political system is not in jeopardy. A competitive party system protects the nation against the discontents of its citizens: grievances and attacks are deflected from the overall system and directed towards the current set of power-holders.

 

Sociologists such as E. A. Ross and Georg Simmel¹ have analysed the integrative role of institutionalized conflicts within political systems. The establishment of regular channels for the expression of conflicting interests has helped to stabilize the structure of a great number of nation-states. The effective equalization of the status of different denominations has helped to take much of the brunt off the earlier conflicts over religious issues. The extension of the suffrage and the enforcement of the freedom of political expression also helped to strengthen the legitimacy of the nation-state. The opening up of channels for the expression of manifest or latent conflicts between the established and the underprivileged classes may have brought many systems out of equilibrium in the earlier phase but tended to strengthen the body politic over time.

 

This conflict-integration dialectic is of central concern in current research on the comparative sociology of political parties. In this [essay] the emphasis will be on conflicts and their translation into party systems. This does not mean that we shall neglect the integrative functions of parties. We have simply chosen to start out from the latent or manifest strains and cleavages and will deal with trends towards compromise and reconciliation against the background of the initial conflicts. Our concern in this introductory discussion is with parties as alliances in conflicts over policies and value commitments within the larger body politic. For the sociologist, parties exert a double fascination. They help to crystallize and make explicit the conflicting interests, the latent strains and contrasts in the existing social structure, and they force subjects and citizens to ally themselves across structural cleavage lines and to set up priorities among their commitments to established or prospective roles in the system. Parties have an expressive function; they develop a rhetoric for the translation of contrasts in the social and the cultural structure into demands and pressures for action or inaction. But they also have instrumental and representative functions: they force the spokesmen for the many contrasting interests and outlooks to strike bargains, to stagger demands, and to aggregate pressures. Small parties may content themselves with expressive functions, but no party can hope to gain decisive influence on the affairs of a community without some willingness to cut across existing cleavages to establish common fronts with potential enemies and opponents. This was true at the early stage of embryonic party formations around cliques and clubs of notables and legislators, but the need for such broad alliances became even more pronounced with the extension of the rights of participation to new strata of the citizenry.

 

Most of the parties aspiring to majority positions in the West are conglomerates of groups differing on wide ranges of issues, but still united in their greater hostility to their competitors in the other camps. Conflicts and controversies can arise out of a great variety of relationships in the social structure, but only a few of these tend to polarize the politics of any given system. There is a hierarchy of cleavage bases in each system and these orders of political primacy not only vary among polities, but also tend to undergo changes over time. Such differences and changes in the political weight of sociocultural cleavages set fundamental problems for comparative research: When is region, language, or ethnicity most likely to prove polarizing? When will class take the primacy and when will denominational commitments and religious identities prove equally important cleavage bases? Which sets of circumstances are most likely to favour accommodations of such oppositions within parties and in which circumstances are they more apt to constitute issues between the parties? Which types of alliances tend to maximize the strain on the polity and which ones help to integrate it? Questions such as these will be on the agenda of comparative political sociology for years to come. There is no dearth of hypotheses, but so far very little in the way of systematic analysis across several systems. It has often been suggested that systems will come under much heavier strain if the main lines of cleavage are over morals and the nature of human destiny than if they concern such mundane and negotiable matters as the prices of commodities, the rights of debtors and creditors, wages and profits, and the ownership of property. However, this does not take us very far; what we want to know is when the one type of cleavage will prove more salient than the other, what kind of alliances they have produced and what consequences these constellations of forces have had for consensus-building within the nation-state. We do not pretend to find clear-cut answers, but we have tried to move the analysis one step further. We shall start out with a review of a variety of logically possible sources of strains and oppositions in social structures and shall then proceed to an inventory of the empirically extant examples of political expressions of each set of conflicts. We have not tried to present a comprehensive scheme of analysis in this context but would like to point to one possible line of approach.

 

Dimensions of Cleavage: A Possible Model

 

Our suggestion is that the crucial cleavages and their political expressions can be ordered within the two-dimensional space [shown in Fig. 9.1].

 

In this model the [l--g] line represents a territorial dimension of the national cleavage structure and the [a--i] line a functional dimension.

 

At the [l] end of the territorial axis we would find strictly local oppositions to encroachments of the aspiring or the dominant national élites and their bureaucracies: the typical reactions of peripheral regions, linguistic minorities, and culturally threatened populations to the pressures of the centralizing, standardizing, and rationalizing machinery of the nationstate. At the [g]end of the axis we would find conflicts not between territorial units within the system but over the control, the organization, the goals, and the policy options of the system as a whole. These might be nothing more than direct struggles among competing élites for central power, but they might also reflect deeper differences in conceptions of nationhood, over domestic priorities and over external strategies.

Conflicts along the [a--i] axis cut across the territorial units of the nation. They produce alliances of similarly situated or similarly oriented subjects and households over wide ranges of localities and tend to undermine the inherited solidarity of the established territorial communities. At the [a] end of this dimension we would find the typical conflict over short-term or long-term allocations of resources, products, and benefits in the economy: conflicts between producers and buyers, between workers and employers, between borrowers and lenders, between tenants and owners, between contributors and beneficiaries. At this end the alignments are specific and the conflicts tend to be solved through rational bargaining and the establishment of universalistic rules of allocation. The farther we move toward the [i] end of the axis, the more diffuse the criteria of alignment, the more intensive the identification with the we group, and the more uncompromising the rejection of the they group. At the [i] end of the dimension we find the typical friend-foe oppositions of tight-knit religious or ideological movements to the surrounding community. The conflict is no longer over specific gains or losses but over conceptions of moral right and over the interpretation of history and human destiny; membership is no longer a matter of multiple affiliation in many directions, but a diffuse 24-hour commitment incompatible with other ties within the community; and communication is no longer kept flowing freely over the cleavage lines but restricted and regulated to protect the movement against impurities and the seeds of compromise.

 

Historically documented cleavages rarely fall at the poles of the two axes: a concrete conflict is rarely exclusively territorial or exclusively functional but will feed on strains in both directions. The model essentially serves as a grid in the comparative analysis of political systems: the task is to locate the alliances behind given parties at given times within this two-dimensional space. The axes are not easily quantifiable, and they may not satisfy any criteria of strict scalability; nevertheless, they seem heuristically useful in attempts such as ours at linking up empirical variations in political structures with current conceptualizations in sociological theory.

 

A few concrete illustrations of party developments may help to clarify the distinctions in our model.

 

In Britain, the first nation-state to recognize the legitimacy of party oppositions, the initial conflicts were essentially of the types we have located at the [l] end of the vertical axis. The heads of independent landed families in the counties opposed the powers and the decisions of the government and the administration in London. The opposition between the Country party of knights and squires and the Court and Treasury party of the Whig magnates and the placemen was primarily territorial. The animosities of the Tories were not necessarily directed against the predominance of London in the affairs of the nation, but they were certainly aroused by the high-handed manipulations of the influential office-holders in the administration and their powerful allies in the boroughs. The conflict was not over general policies but over patronage and places. The gentry did not get their share of the quid pro quo exchanges of local influence against governmental offices and never established a clear-cut common front against the central power-holders. Toryism about 1750 was primarily the opposition of the local rulers to central authority and vanished wherever members of that class entered the orbit of Government.

 

Such particularistic, kin-centred, ins-outs oppositions are common in the early phases of nation-building: the electoral clienteles are small, undifferentiated, and easily controlled, and the stakes to be gained or lost in public life tend to be personal and concrete rather than collective and general.

 

Purely territorial oppositions rarely survive extensions of the suffrage. Much will depend, of course, on the timing of the crucial steps in the building of the nation: territorial unification, the establishment of legitimate government and the monopolization of the agencies of violence, the take-off towards industrialization and economic growth, the development of popular education, and the entry of the lower classes into organized politics. Early democratization will not necessarily generate clear-cut divisions on functional lines. The initial result of a widening of the suffrage will often be an accentuation of the contrasts between the countryside and the urban centres and between the orthodox-fundamentalist beliefs of the peasantry and the small-town citizens and the secularism fostered in the larger cities and the metropolis. In the United States, the cleavages were typically cultural and religious. The struggles between the Jeffersonians and the Federalists, the Jacksonians and the Whigs, the Democrats and the Republicans centred on contrasting conceptions of public morality and pitted Puritans and other Protestants against Deists, Freemasons, and immigrant Catholics and Jews. The accelerating influx of lower-class immigrants into the metropolitan areas and the centres of industry accentuated the contrasts between the rural and the urban cultural environments and between the backward and the advanced states of the Union. Such cumulations of territorial and cultural cleavages in the early phases of democratization can be documented for country after country. In Norway, all freehold and most leasehold peasants were given the vote as early as in 1814, but took several decades to mobilize in opposition to the Kings officials and the dominance of the cities in the national economy. The crucial cleavages brought out into the open in the seventies were essentially territorial and cultural: the provinces were pitted against the capital; the increasingly estate-conscious peasants defended their traditions and their culture against the standards forced on them by the bureaucracy and the urban bourgeoisie. Interestingly, the extension of the suffrage to the landless labourers in the countryside and the propertyless workers in the cities did not bring about an immediate polarization of the polity on class lines. Issues of language, religion, and morality kept up the territorial oppositions in the system and cut across issues between the poorer and the better-off strata of the population. There were significant variations, however, between localities and between religions: the initial politics of cultural defence survived the extension of the suffrage in the egalitarian communities of the South and the West, but lost to straight class politics in the economically backward, hierarchically organized communities of the North. The developments in the South and West of Norway find interesting parallels in the Celtic fringe of Britain. In these areas, particularly in Wales, opposition to the territorial, cultural, and economic dominance of the English offered a basis for communitywide support for the Liberals and retarded the development of straight class politics, even in the coalfields. The sudden upsure of Socialist strength in the northern periphery of Norway parallels the spectacular victory of the Finnish working-class party at the first election under universal suffrage: the fishermen and the crofters of the Norwegian North backed a distinct lower-class party as soon as they got the vote, and so did the Finnish rural proletariat. In terms of our abstract model the politics of the western peripheries of Norway and Britain has its focus at the lower end of the [l-g] axis, whereas the politics of the backward districts of Finland and the Norwegian North represent alliance formations closer to [g] and at varying points of the [a--i] axis. In the one case the decisive criterion of alignment is commitment to the locality and its dominant culture: you vote with your community and its leaders irrespective of your economic position. In the other the criterion is commitment to a class and its collective interests: you vote with others in the same position as yourself whatever their localities, and you are willing to do so even if this brings you into opposition with members of your community. We rarely find one criterion of alignment completely dominant. There will be deviants from straight territorial voting just as often as from straight class voting. But we often find marked differences between regions in the weight of the one or the other criterion of alignment. Here ecological analyses of electoral records and census data for the early phases of mobilization may help us to map such variations in greater detail and to pinpoint factors strengthening the dominance of territorial politics and factors accelerating the process of class polarization.

 

The Two Revolutions: The National and the Industrial

 

Territorial oppositions set limits to the process of nationbuilding; pushed to their extreme they lead to war, secession, possibly even population transfers. Functional oppositions can only develop after some initial consolidation of the national territory. They emerge with increasing interaction and communication across the localities and the regions, and they spread through a process of social mobilization. The growing nation-state developed a wide range of agencies of unification and standardization and gradually penetrated the bastions of primordial local culture. So did the organizations of the Church, sometimes in close co-operation with the secular administrators, often in opposition to and competition with the officers of the state. And so did the many autonomous agencies of economic development and growth, the networks of traders and merchants, of bankers and financiers, of artisans and industrial entrepreneurs.

 

The early growth of the national bureaucracy tended to produce essentially territorial oppositions, but the subsequent widening of the scope of governmental activities and the acceleration of cross-local interactions gradually made for much more complex systems of alignments, some of them between localities, and others across and within localities.

 

The early waves of countermobilization often threatened the territorial unity of the nation, the federation, or the empire. The mobilization of the peasantry in Norway and in Sweden made it gradually impossible to keep up the union; the mobilization of the subject peoples of the Habsburg territories broke up the empire; the mobilization of the Irish Catholics led to civil war and secession. The current strains of nation-building in the new states of Africa and Asia reflect similar conflicts between dominant and subject cultures; the recent histories of the Congo, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, and the Sudan can all be written in such terms. In some cases the early waves of mobilization may not have brought the territorial system to the brink of disruption but left an intractable heritage of territorial-cultural conflict: the Catalan-Basque-Castilian oppositions in Spain, the conflict between Flemings and Walloons in Belgium, and the English-French cleavages in Canada. The conditions for the softening or hardening of such cleavage lines in fully mobilized polities have been poorly studied. The multiple ethnic-religious cleavages of Switzerland and the language conflicts in Finland and Norway have proved much more manageable than the recently aggravated conflict between Nederlands-speakers and francophones in Belgium and between Quebec and the English-speaking provinces of Canada.

 

To account for such variations we clearly cannot proceed cleavage by cleavage but must analyse constellations of conflict lines within each polity.

 

To account for the variations in such constellations we have found it illuminating to distinguish four critical lines of cleavage [see Fig. 9.2]. Two of these cleavages are direct products of what we might call the National Revolution: the conflict between the central nation-building culture and the increasing resistance of the ethnically, linguistically, or religiously distinct subject populations in the provinces and the peripheries (1 in Fig. 9.2): the conflict between the centralizing, standardizing, and mobilizing Nation-State and the historically established corporate privileges of the Church (2).

Two of them are products of the Industrial Revolution: the conflict between the landed interests and the rising class of industrial entrepreneurs (3): the conflict between owners and employers on the one side and tenants, labourers, and workers on the other (4).

 

Much of the history of Europe since the beginning of the nineteenth century can be described in terms of the interaction between these two processes of revolutionary change: the one triggered in France and the other originating in Britain. Both had consequences for the cleavage structure of each nation, but the French Revolution produced the deepest and the bitterest oppositions. The decisive battle came to stand between the aspirations of the mobilizing nation-state and the corporate claims of the churches. This was far more than a matter of economics. It is true that the status of church properties and the financing of religious activities were the subjects of violent controversy, but the fundamental issue was one of morals, of the control of community norms. This found reflection in fights over such matters as the solemnization of marriage and the granting of divorces, the organization of charities and the handling of deviants, the functions of medical versus religious officers, and the arrangements for funerals. However, the fundamental issue between Church and State focused on the control of education.

 

The Church, whether Roman Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed, had for centuries claimed the right to represent mans spiritual estate and to control the education of children in the right faith. In the Lutheran countries, steps were taken as early as in the seventeenth century to enforce elementary education in the vernacular for all children. The established national churches simply became agents of the state and had no reason to oppose such measures. In the religiously mixed countries and in purely Catholic ones, however, the ideas of the French Revolution proved highly divisive. The development of compulsory education under centralized secular control for all children of the nation came into direct conflict with the established rights of the religious pouvoirs intermédiaires and triggered waves of mass mobilization into nationwide parties of protest. To the radicals and liberals inspired by the French Revolution, the introduction of compulsory education was only one among several measures in a systematic effort to create direct links of influence and control between the nation-state and the individual citizen, but their attempt to penetrate directly to the children without consulting the parents and their spiritual authorities aroused widespread opposition and bitter fights.

 

The parties of religious defence generated through this process grew into broad mass movements after the introduction of manhood suffrage and were able to claim the loyalties of remarkably high proportions of the church-goers in the working class. These proportions increased even more, of course, as the franchise was extended to women on a par with men. Through a process very similar to the one to be described for the Socialist parties, these church movements tended to isolate their supporters from outside influence through the development of a wide variety of parallel organizations and agencies: they not only built up schools and youth movements of their own, but also developed confessionally distinct trade unions, sports clubs, leisure associations, publishing houses, magazines, newspapers, in one or two cases even radio and television stations.

 

Perhaps the best example of institutionalized segmentation is found in the Netherlands; in fact, the Dutch word Verzuiling has recently become a standard term for tendencies to develop vertical networks (zuilen, columns or pillars) of associations and institutions to ensure maximum loyalty to each church and to protect the supporters from cross-cutting communications and pressures. Dutch society has for close to a century been divided into three distinct subcultures: the national-liberal-secular, frequently referred to as the algemene, the 'general' sector; the orthodox Protestant column; and the Roman Catholic column.

 

The symmetric representation of the four basic cleavage lines in Fig. 9.2 refers to average tendencies only and does not exclude wide variations in location along the [a--i] axis. Conflicts over the civic integration of recalcitrant regional cultures (1) or religious organizations (2) need not always lead to Verzuiling. An analysis of the contrasts between Switzerland and the Netherlands would tell us a great deal about differences in the conditions for the development of pluralist insulation. Conflicts between primary producers and the urban-industrial interests have normally tended towards the [a] pole of the axis, but there are many examples of highly ideologized peasant oppositions to officials and burghers. Conflicts between workers and employers have always contained elements of economic bargaining, but there have also often been strong elements of cultural opposition and ideological insulation. Working-class parties in opposition and without power have tended to be more verzuild, more wrapped up in their own distinct mythology, more insulated against the rest of the society. By contrast the victorious Labour parties have tended to become ontzuild, domesticated, more open to influence from all segments within the national society.

 

Similar variations will occur at a wide range of points on the territorial axis of our schema. In our initial discussion of the [l] pole we gave examples of cultural and religious resistances to the domination of the central national élite, but such oppositions are not always purely territorial. The movements may be completely dominant in their provincial strongholds but may also find allies in the central areas and thus contribute to the development of cross-local and cross-regional fronts.

 

The opposition of the Old Left in Norway was essentially of this character. It was from the outset a movement of territorial protest against the dominance of the central élite of officials and patricians but gradually broadened into a mass movement of cultural opposition to the dominant urban strata. As the suffrage was extended and the mobilization efforts proceeded it was also able to entrench itself in the central cities and even gain control in some of them. This very broadening of the movement made the Old Left increasingly vulnerable to fragmentation. One wing moved toward the [a]  pole and set itself up as an Agrarian party (3 in Fig. 9.2); another wing moved toward the i pole and after a long history of strains within the mother party established itself as the Christian Peoples party (1 in Fig. 9.2). The Scandinavian countries have seen the formation of several such moralist-evangelist parties opposed to the tolerant pragmatism of the Established Lutheran Church. They differ from the Christian parties on the Continent: they have not opposed national education as such and have not built up extensive networks of functional organizations around their followers; they have been primarily concerned to defend the traditions of orthodox evangelism against the onslaught of urban secularism and to use the legislative and the executive machinery of the state to protect the young against the evils of modern life. In their rejection of the lukewarm latitudinarianism of the national Mother Church they resemble the Nonconformists in Great Britain and the Anti-Revolutionaries in the Netherlands, but the contexts of their efforts have been very different. In the British case the religious activists could work within the Liberal party (later, of course, also within Labour) and found it possible to advance their views without establishing a party of their own. In the Dutch case, the orthodox dissidents not only set up their own party but built up a strong column of vertical organizations around it.

 

The National Revolution forced ever-widening circles of the territorial population to chose sides in conflicts over values and cultural identities. The Industrial Revolution also triggered a variety of cultural countermovements, but in the longer run tended to cut across the value communities within the nation and to force the enfranchised citizenry to choose sides in terms of their economic interests, their shares in the increased wealth generated through the spread of the new technologies and the widening markets.

 

In our  [a-g-i-i]  paradigm we have distinguished two types of such interest cleavages: cleavages between rural and urban interests (3) and cleavages between worker and employer interests (4).

 

The spectacular growth of world trade and industrial production generated increasing strains between the primary producers in the countryside and the merchants and the entrepreneurs in the towns and the cities. On the Continent, the conflicting interests of the rural and the urban areas had been recognized since the Middle Ages in the separate representation of the estates: the nobility and, in exceptional cases, the freehold peasants spoke for the land, and the burghers spoke for the cities. The Industrial Revolution deepened these conflicts and in country after country produced distinct ruralurban alignments in the national legislatures. Often the old divisions between estates were simply carried over into the unified parliaments and found expression in oppositions between Conservative-Agrarian and Liberal-Radical parties. The conflicts between rural and urban interests had been much less marked in Great Britain than on the Continent. The House of Commons was not an assembly of the burgher estate but a body of legislators representing the constituent localities of the realm, the counties and the boroughs. Yet even there the Industrial Revolution produced deep and bitter cleavages between the landed interests and the urban; in England, if not in Wales and Scotland, the opposition between Conservatives and Liberals fed largely on these strains until the 1880s.

 

There was a hard core of economic conflict in these oppositions, but what made them so deep and bitter was the struggle for the maintenance of acquired status and the recognition of achievement. In England, the landed élite ruled the country, and the rising class of industrial entrepreneurs, many of them religiously at odds with the Established Church, for decades aligned themselves in opposition both to defend their economic interests and to assert their claims to status. It would be a 8 misunderstanding, says the historian George Kitson Clark, to think of agriculture 'as an industry organized like any other industry—primarily for the purposes of efficient production. It was... rather organized to ensure the survival intact of a caste.' The proprietors of the great estates were not just very rich men whose capital happened to be invested in land, they were rather the life tenants of very considerable positions which it was their duty to leave intact to their successors. In a way it was the estate that mattered and not the holder of the estate. . . . The conflict between Conservatives and Liberals reflected an opposition between two value orientations: the recognition of status through ascription and kin connections versus the claims for status through achievement and enterprise.

 

These are typical strains in all transitional societies; they tend to be most intensive in the early phases of industrialization and to soften as the rising élite establishes itself in the community. In England, this process of reconciliation proceeded quite rapidly. In a society open to extensive mobility and intermarriage, urban and industrial wealth could gradually be translated into full recognition within the traditional hierarchy of the landed families. More and more mergers took place between the agricultural and the business interests, and this consolidation of the national élite soon changed the character of the Conservative-Liberal conflict. As James Cornford has shown through his detailed ecological studies, the movement of the business owners into the countryside and the suburbs divorced them from their workers and brought them into close relations with the landed gentry. The result was a softening of the rural-urban conflict in the system and a rapidly increasing class polarization of the widened electorate.

 

A similar rapprochement took place between the east Elbian agricultural interests and the western business bourgeoisie in Germany, but there, significantly, the bulk of the Liberals sided with the Conservatives and did not try to rally the workingclass electorate on their side in the way the British party did during the period up to World War I. The result was a deepening of the chasm between burghers and workers and a variety of desperate attempts to bridge it through appeals to national and military values.

 

In other countries of the European continent the rural-urban cleavage continued to assert itself in national politics far into the twentieth century, but the political expressions of the cleavage varied widely. Much depended on the concentrations of wealth and political control in the cities and on the ownership structure in the rural economy. In the Low Countries, France, Italy, and Spain, rural-urban cleavages rarely found direct expression in the development of party oppositions. Other cleavages, particularly between the state and the churches and between owners and tenants, had greater impact on the alignments of the electorates. By contrast, in the five Nordic countries the cities had traditionally dominated national political life, and the struggle for democracy and parliamentary rule was triggered off through a broad process of mobilization within the peasantry. This was essentially an expression of protest against the central élite of officials and patricians (a cleavage on the [l-g] axis in our model), but there were also elements of economic opposition in the movement: the peasants felt exploited in their dealings with city folk and wanted to shift the tax burdens to the expanding urban economies. These economic cleavages became more and more pronounced as the primary-producing communities entered into the national money and market economy. The result was the formation of a broad front of interest organizations and co-operatives and the development of distinctive Agrarian parties. Even after the rise of the working-class parties to national dominance, these Agrarian parties did not find it possible to establish common fronts with the Conservative defenders of the business community. The cultural contrasts between the countryside and the cities were still strong, and the strict market controls favoured by the Agrarians could not easily be reconciled with the philosophy of free competition espoused by many Conservatives.

 

The conflict between landed and urban interests was centred in the commodity market. The peasants wanted to sell their wares at the best possible prices and to buy what they needed from the industrial and urban producers at low cost. Such conflicts did not invariably prove party-forming. They could be dealt with within broad party fronts or could be channelled through interest organizations into narrower arenas of functional representation and bargaining. Distinctly agrarian parties have only emerged where strong cultural oppositions have deepened and embittered the strictly economic conflicts.

 

Conflicts in the labour market proved much more uniformly divisive. Working-class parties emerged in every country of Europe in the wake of the early waves of industrialization. The rising masses of wage-earners, whether in large-scale farming, in forestry, or in industry, resented their conditions of work and the insecurity of their contracts, and many of them felt socially and culturally alienated from the owners and the employers. The result was the formation of a variety of labour unions and the development of nationwide Socialist parties. The success of such movements depended on a variety of factors: the strength of the paternalist traditions of ascriptive recognition of the worker status, the size of the work unit and the local ties of the workers, the level of prosperity and the stability of employment in the given industry, and the chances of improvements and promotion through loyal devotion or through education and achievement.

 

A crucial factor in the development of distinct working-class movements was the openness of the given society: Was the worker status a lifetime predicament or were there openings for advancement? How easy was it to get an education qualifying for a change in status? What prospects were there for striking out on ones own, for establishing independent work units? The contrasts between American and European developments must clearly be analysed in these terms; the American workers were not only given the vote much earlier than their comrades in Europe; but they also found their way into the national system so much more easily because of the greater stress on equality and achievement, because of the many openings to better education, and, last but not least, because the established workers could advance to better positions as new waves of immigrants took over the lower-status jobs. A similar process is currently under way in the advanced countries of Western Europe. The immigrant proletariats from the Mediterranean countries and from the West Indies allow the children of the established national working class to move into the middle class, and these new waves of mobility tend to drain off traditional sources of resentment.

 

In nineteenthand early twentieth-century Europe the status barriers were markedly higher. The traditions from the estatedivided society kept the workers in their place, and the narrowness of the educational channels of mobility also made it difficult for sons and daughters to rise above their fathers. There were, however, important variations among the countries of Europe in the attitudes of the established and the rising élites to the claims of the workers, and these differences clearly affected the development of the unions and the Socialist parties. In Britain and the Scandinavian countries the attitudes of the élites tended to be open and pragmatic. As in all other countries there was active resistance to the claims of the workers, but little or no direct repression. These are today the countries with the largest and the most domesticated Labour parties in Europe. In Germany and Austria, France, Italy, and Spain the cleavages went much deeper. A number of attempts were made to repress the unions and the Socialists, and the working-class organizations consequently tended to isolate themselves from the national culture and to develop soziale Ghettoparteien, strongly ideological movements seeking to isolate their members and their supporters from influences from the encompassing social environments. In terms of our paradigm, these parties were just as close to the i pole as their opponents in the religious camp. This anti-system orientation of large sections of the European working class was brought to a climax in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. The Communist movement did not just speak for an alienated stratum of the territorial community but came to be seen as an external conspiracy against the nation. These developments brought a number of European countries to the point of civil war in the twenties and the thirties. The greater the numbers of citizens caught in such direct friend-foe oppositions to each other the greater the danger of total disruption of the body politic.

 

Developments since World War II have pointed towards a reduction of such pitched oppositions and some softening of ideological tensions: a movement from the [i] toward the [a] pole in 11 our paradigm.  A variety of factors contributed to this development: the experience of national co-operation during the war, the improvements in the standard of living in the fifties, the rapid growth of a new middle class bridging the gaps between the traditional working class and the bourgeoisie. But the most important factor was possibly the entrenchment of the working-class parties in local and national governmental structures and their consequent domestication within the established system. The developments in Austria offer a particularly revealing example. The extreme opposition between Socialists and Catholics had ended in civil war in 1934, but after the experience of National Socialist domination, war, and occupation, the two parties settled down to share government responsibilities under a Proporz system, a settlement still based on mutual distrust between the two camps but at least one that recognized the necessity for coexistence. Comparisons of the positions taken by the two leading Communist parties in Western Europe, the Italian and the French, also point to the importance of entrenchments in the national system of government. The French party has been much less involved in the running of local communities and has remained much more isolated within the national system, while the Italian party has responded much more dynamically to the exigencies of community decision-making. Erick Allardt has implicitly demonstrated the importance of similar factors in a comparison of levels of class polarization in the Nordic countries. He points out that while the percentage of working-class voters siding with the Left (Communists and Social Democrats) is roughly the same in Finland as in Norway and Sweden, the percentage of middle-class leftists used to be much lower in Finland than in the two other countries. This difference appears to be related to a contrast in the chances of upward mobility from the working class: very low in Finland, markedly higher in the other 12 countries. The continued isolation of the Finnish workingclass parties may reflect a lower level of participation in responsible decision-making in the local communities and in the nation. This has not yet been investigated in detail, but studies of working-class mobility and political changes carried out in Norway suggest that the principal channels of advancement were in the public sector and that the decisive wave of bourgeoisification came in the wake of the accession of the Labour party to a position of dominance in the system. In Finland the protracted period of underground Communism until 1944 and the deep split in the working-class movement during the next decades tended to keep the two parties from decisive influence on the public sector and maintained the old barriers against mobility; in the other Scandinavian countries the victories of the Social Democrat Labour parties had opened up new channels of mobility and helped to break down the isolation of the working class.