The paper will address the question, whether persistent disparities between West and East Germany have developed into a social cleavage which is politically represented at the level of national and state parliaments. Earlier studies have indicated that in the process of national (re)integration after reunification, the East-West divide has been less articulate at the level of political elites than at the level of the general population. The reluctance of German political elites to promote East-West disparities to main issues of political conflict can be explained by their interest in consolidating their national power basis and in preserving a common arena for political competition. The superimposition of social divisions at regional level by elite integration at national level prevents the East-West divide from developing into a cleavage of the Lipset/Rokkanian type. The empirical evidence used in the paper will be based on the population and elite surveys of the German Parliamentarians study. The paper closes with general conclusions concerning the prerequisites of cleavage formation and cleavage representation using the theoretical concepts of principal agent-theory.
