How States Make Cleavages: Endogenous Cleavage Formation in Western Europe

• In Event: State Power and Political Identities

Abstract

I develop and test a novel theory that communal cleavages emerge in response to government policies. Decisions like how to distribute resources and who has political rights politicize social divisions when they create winners and losers along those same divisions. After political entrepreneurs learn about the potential for a new coalition of voters, they begin to coordinate and organize the aggrieved voters around the politicized identities to gain legislative power and influence policymaking. To control for reverse causality between government policies and political preferences, I test the theory on a case of plausibly exogenous state intervention that was not responding to public pressure, but rather to other forces. This happened in 1852 when a minister in the Prussian government initiated a series of decrees that were meant to target a religious minority, the Jesuits, and unintentionally affected all Catholics. Using process-tracing based on primary and secondary sources, I analyze the formation of the Catholic cleavage in Prussia. My analysis gains additional leverage from negative cases with failed attempts by political entrepreneurs to craft the cleavage before the government policies were initiated. This paper turns the conventional wisdom about social cleavages, parties, and public policy on its head. It demonstrates that the cleavage did not emerge from critical junctures or crafted by entrepreneurial politicians. Instead; it was created and sustained by public policy. This paper has implications for understanding the formation of identity-based electoral cleavages in contemporary democracies.

Author

• Maayan Mor, University of Barcelona