Western Political Science, Concept of Cleavages and its Transformations

Present article tries to describe the pathway which this concept traced since the days of the most famous theory of Stein Rokkan in the late 1960s. Lipset’s and Rokkan’s developmental model of cleavages is described. Main advantages and disadvantages of Rokkan’s model are discussed. The problem of strong cross-cutting cleavages and their impact for party system stability are also discussed. Then the impact of post-materialistic values and post-materialistic cleavage (R. Ingleharťs concept) is discussed with the conclusion that post-materialistic cleavage brought important division to the Western societies and party systems, but its impact is not so revolutionary as Inglehart foresaw. The development of different concepts and scientific uses are described, however, the main attention is paid to the phenomenon of translation of cleavages based research method beyond the territory of Western Europe. The article concludes that, speaking generally, there are two basic approaches of using cleavages in political science research: so called "political cleavages" and "social cleavages".