Traditionally, parties and individual MPs have positioned themselves on cleavages that divide society (Lipset & Rokkan, 1967). The different societal groups based on these societal cleavages have had for a long time a clear political expression in parliament: parties and parliamentarians voicing the interests of one particular group based on one or more cleavages, for instance social-democratic parties raising working class interests. The last few decades, however, it appears that these traditional cleavages have blurred and consequently that the relevance of representing the interests of these groups have diminished. At the same time, the representation of new groups in society have gained interest: the under representation of women, ethnic minorities, etc. is questioned (Phillips, 1995) and efforts are made to enhance this representation. It should be noted that in this view, individual parliamentarians rather than parties are expected to act as defender of the interests of these new social groups. In this paper, we will investigate how relevant traditional and new cleavage structures are in contemporary European parliaments: are old cleavages still relevant for the representation and mobilization strategies of MPs? Have they been complemented by new cleavages? Or have they been replaced by new cleavages? We will take both attitudinal and behavioral aspects of individual MPs into account. We will use the survey dataset of the Partirep MP Survey, which contains data about characteristics, attitudes and behaviour of MPs in 14 European countries.
