DIMENSIONS OF POLITICAL CLEAVAGE IN MULTI‐PARTY SYSTEMS

Abstract

ABSTRACTRecent research on political dimensions in the Scandinavian party systems at five non‐electorate “levels” of dimensional analysis (content analysis of party programs, content analysis of expressions of party stances on current issues, positions taken by the parliamentary parties as behaving units, roll call analysis and interviews of individual legislators, and interviews with leaders and members of party organizations) justify the rejection of the unidimensional spatial model of party competition. Data on the social structure, attitudes and opinions, and voting behavior of the supporters of different parties provide indirect information about the dimensions of political cleavage. More directly, the “perceived party dimensions” can be concluded from aggregates of individual assessments for which the parties as such are the stimuli Averaged rank orderings of the parties provide ordinal measures that have been used as inputs for multidimensional scaling techniques.An experiment of measuring the mutual distances of political parties in Finland used percentages of the second and the two last party choices as measures of party distance. A qualitative analysis of the exceptions to regular orderings along the basic left/right dimension suggested the presence of six additional political dimensions: the producers and agriculture/the consumers and urban industries; the established parties/the temporary small parties; recognized and noted centers/the “forgotten people” (populist dimension); Finnish/Swedish; communism/non‐communism; and victorious/losing.Three developments can be envisaged in future dimensional analysis of multiparty systems: comparisons across countries, comparisons between different levels in the political system, and predictions of emerging political changes.