engleski

Socioeconomic Change, Changing Political Cleavages, and the Emergence of New Parties

This dissertation analyzes how social and economic changes, brought about by the process of deindustrialization, affected developments in patterns of political divisions in advanced industrial democracies. The principal argument of this dissertation is that social and economic changes in advanced industrial societies linked to deindustrialization produced a social structure that is by and large more complex than that of classic industrial societies before or just after the Second World War. The complexity of post-industrial societies can be described as ‘greater fragmentation’, which is caused by the crosscutting of a large number of social characteristics that define one’s position in post-industrial societies. In short, fragmentation essentially means that both middle and working classes in post-industrial societies do not represent a unified actor to the same extent that they did in classic industrial societies. In the middle-class there is a new sizable group of professionals, and in the working-class there is a division between exposure to market risk and sector of employment. Such fragmented social structure made it difficult for established parties of the left and right to cover the whole newly emerged political space, so the emergence of new parties of the new left and the new right was inevitable. What exact shape these new competitors took in each country depended upon the type of welfare regime, models of capitalism and the policies that governments implemented in response to the process of deindustrialization. This dissertation advances two principal propositions: (1) The first proposition states that the social and economic change of advanced industrial societies produced a social structure which is more fragmented than the social structure of postwar industrial societies, and that this fragmentation of the social structure allowed for the emergence of new parties. (2) The second proposition states that this whole process was characterized by a significant degree of cross-national variation, concerning both the developments of the social structure and the party system. This cross-national variation is dependent on the characteristics of the welfare regime, the model of capitalism in interaction with pre-existing political divisions, and the reactions of governments to deindustrialization and globalization. To investigate these propositions, the empirical part of the dissertation investigates sources of divisions in both the social structure and political attitudes in order to map the structure of political divisions and find support for the fragmentation hypotheses. The second segment of the empirical analysis used in the dissertation focuses on the manner in which macro-level variables (such as types of welfare regime and models of capitalism) interacted with micro-level variables (such as indicators of socioeconomic position) in the structuring of political preferences, and whether this resulted in the emergence of new parties. The analysis finds support for both hypotheses: new parties did emerge due the emergence of social groups not yet represented in the party system, and the manner in which this development took place is dependent on the variation in contextual factors, notably the type of welfare regime, and actions (policies) that political figures used in the development of a welfare state, in reaction to deindustrialization.

welfare state; political cleavages; electoral behavior; new parties; party competition

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