Social Cleavage and Party Affiliation: Germany, Great Britain, and the United States

Abstract

Changes in social stratification underlie the decline in social-class-conflict politics in Western industrialized nations. Comparative analysis of the sources of social cleavage and party affiliation is explored by means of relatively comparable bodies of survey research data for West sermany, Great Britain, and the United States. One model of analysis, that of "middle-majority politics," which emphasized the emergence of middle-class type occupations and the continuous decline of dessensus and ideologically based issues, is rejected. Instead, a model of "consensus and cleavage" is offered which assumes a transformation in social-class-based politics but points to the manifestation of political conflict rooted in new and more differentiated social groupings which reflect economic, professional, and bureaucratic interests. Party affiliation is most related to social class in Great Britain, next in west Germany, and least in the United States; in each nation different social-structural variables operated as the secondary basis of cleavages in party affiliation.