:orphan:
:title: The Decline of Social Cleavages in Western Europe Revisited
:fulltitle: Social Structure and Electoral Behavior in Comparative Perspective: The Decline of Social Cleavages in Western Europe Revisited

.. bibsource:: ../publications.bib
.. pub-details:: elff:cleavage.decline.revisited
        
.. abstract::

   A new conventional wisdom characterizes the comparative study of
   electoral politics. Social cleavages, once a stabilizing factor of
   electoral behavior in Western Europe, are on the wane. Voting decisions
   have become individualized and old social cleavages have been superseded
   by new value-related cleavages. This article challenges that view as an
   exaggeration. Social cleavages have not disappeared and are not in
   universal decline, as demonstrated by an examination of data from seven
   countries from 1975 to 2002. Religious--secular voting is mostly stable,
   while class voting shows an unambiguous decline in only some of the
   countries under study. Further, neither rising levels of cognitive
   mobilization nor a dissemination of postmaterialist value priorities can
   account for these changes in class voting. The exaggeration of limited
   changes to general trends seems to rest on a disregard of the effects of
   party competition on patterns of electoral behavior. I suggest that
   further research should focus on the effects of parties' electoral
   strategies on the electoral relevance of social cleavages.

Replication material can be found `here </data/Elff2007-ReplicationData.zip>`_
and here: |zenodo|_

.. |zenodo| image:: zenodo.3829618.svg
.. _zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3829618