Democracy and elections seminar
| Dates: | 14 January 2015 |
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| Times: | 15:30 - 17:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, Alumni, Current University students |
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| Speaker: | Eduardo Olivares Concha |
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Eduardo Olivares Concha ‘Hierarchical importance of cleavages: not all are the same for party systems’
Abstract
One of the most studied fields in party system scholarship is that of cleavage formation, development and decline in mature democracies.
Much of the work has proceeded from the classic studies by Lipset and Rokkan (1967) and Inglehart (1971, 1977) as well as Bartolini and Mair (1990).
More recently scholars have started to examine how party system institutionalisation takes place in new democracies (Casal Bértoa 2011, Hicken and Kuhonta 2011, Mainwaring and Scully 1995, Mainwaring and Torcal 2006).
This work has thrown up several challenges to cleavage theory and the extent to which it can be applied to new democracies that do not demonstrate the traditional socio-cultural divisions seen in the more established systems.
In this paper I attempt to link cleavage theory with an understanding of party institutionalisation in newer democracies to understand how far traditional cleavage models can help explain levels of system stability. Using several waves of the World Values Survey series, I test the contribution of different sets of cleavages to the stability of party systems in young democracies from different regions in the world.
Results of regression analyses show evidence that 1) the ideological dimension (left-right continuum) is more important than other cleavages to contribute to higher levels of party system institutionalisation, and 2) party systems stabilise faster where there is a higher relevance of the ideological cleavage in the voters’ party preferences.
Eduardo Olivares Concha's profile: http://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/subjects/politics/postgraduate-research/current-phd-students/eduardo-olivares-concha/
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