The Impact of Social Inequality on the Transformation of Cleavage Politics: Evidence from Southern Europe

During the previous 15 years, the electoral politics and party systems of most European democracies have undergone significant changes, driven mostly by the emergence of new issue dimensions accelerated by the economic and immigration crises in Europe. The most obvious transformations include the emergence of new parties, increased party system polarization and fragmentation, electoral volatility, new division within traditional right-wing and left-wing political blocs and growing dissatisfaction with mainstream political actors and institutions that has led many commentators to a crisis of representation. The countries of Southern Europe, particularly Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain, have often been at the epicenter of these crises and transformations. Even though there have been recent attempts to explore the role of inequality in the development of political cleavages (e.g. the work by Gethin, Martínez-Toledano and Thomas PIketty), there hasn't been much research on the formation of new cleavages and the creation of new political subcultures as a result of new structural inequalities that have formed over the past 15 years. The current paper investigates the impact of inequality on the formation of these new cleavages in the four Southern European countries, utilizing individual-level comparative data from 2007 to 2020.