Cleavages, issues and parties: a critical overview of the literature

We discuss a number of contributions regarding the links between social cleavages, policy issues and political parties. Two bodies of literature can be distinguished, according to whether they take political parties as dependent or independent variable in their analyses. When parties are considered as explanatory variables, we focus on the “entrepreneurial” role of politicians in the policy issue space. Those politicians can exploit the electoral payoff of issues on which their party is perceived as more competent by voters, or explore new issues with a potential ownership advantage. In the long run these actions can influence the structure of social cleavages within a given polity