Understanding Cleavages in Party Systems

There has been considerable debate about the characteristics of political cleavages underlying post-Communist Central and Eastern European party competition, with views ranging from no structure, to unidimensionality, to structured diversity, to entirely sui generis country-specific approaches. Much of the disagreement, the authors argue, results from the failure to take seriously the distinction between issue position and issue salience. Taking this into account, the authors present a model of party cleavages that synthesizes the various arguments into one comprehensive model. Empirical evidence for the argument is derived from an expert survey of 87 parties in 13 post-Communist democracies. Theoretically, this study provides a much more positive picture of the character of party cleavages and of democratic responsiveness in post-Communist states than is generally accepted.