Economic Manifestations of the Post-industrial Cleavage: Parties’ group appeals and social policy priorities

In recent decades, scholars investigating the politics of advanced democracies have identified changes in relationships between social groups and political parties, with many identifying these changes as amounting to realignment along a new social cleavage. While this seems to be mostly considered as a cultural realignment, along with the growing salience of second-dimension issues, I argue that these changes are expressed in economic-distributive issues as well. The emerging cleavage stems from significant social and economic transformations that have reshaped the size and nature of relevant social groups in the electorate. Parties aiming to mobilize these groups may utilize both group and policy appeals. Given the sustained public importance of economic-distributive issues, and the alignment of such issues with the moral perspectives on societal justice of different social groups, I assert that socio-economic, not just cultural, policy appeals play a major role. This study focuses on parties’ side of the picture. It asks whether and how parties changed the social groups they appeal to and the social policies they endorse, whether the two are related to each other, and to the social and economic transformations that are at the root of the new cleavage (e.g. de-industrialization, globalization, the massification of education). Answering these questions involves three challenges. First, the main drivers of the cleavage are social and economic transformations that altered the relevant social groups both in size and in kind. We therefore cannot rely on analyses of the groups that were prominent for older cleavages. Second, following the recent literature on welfare politics, conflicts between the new social groups regarding the welfare state may not revolve primarily around the level of taxation and spending, but rather around the kinds of policies to spend on. The identification of what parties offer must therefore go beyond identifying general support for the welfare state, and differentiate between support for different kinds of social policies. Third, and empirically, identifying the cleavage that follows from transformations experienced by many advanced democracies, requires analysis across countries, party families, and years. To address these challenges and answer the questions, the study utilizes computational text analyses of party manifestos from 22 advanced democracies, over 50 years and a variety of party families. Both supervised and semi-supervised approaches are used to detect mentions of different social groups and endorsement of different social policies within the manifestos. These are used both for an inductive description of changes in the political landscape, and for testing hypotheses derived from expectations regarding three major players in the formation of the new cleavage – social-democratic, green, and radical right parties. Work on the automated identification of these textual components is currently in progress. Preliminary results detect the hypothesized textual components and support my hypotheses.