Party Systems in Europe

Political Science in Western Europe

Lipset and Rokkam's freezing hypothesis, published in the 1967, approached the political spectrum from their experiential paradigm. The party system in Europe, and indeed most of the western world, had evolved through a homogeneous process which had experiences little in the way of social upheaval. The economies of the West were based on societal evolutions form agriculture to industry which had smoothly transitioned, and formed the basis for social prosperity and order.

However, in the late 60's and 70's, the cradle of prosperity gave birth to other forces by which citizens wanted to identify themselves. Social caused, and religious ethics, which had been somewhat ignored by secular social system became important to the individual. Lipset and Rokkan based their theory on the assumption that if men were given equal right to vote, then a level of social freezing would take place, limiting the emergence of oppositional parties. However, as society became increasingly diverse, leaving the homogeneous order of the 50's and 60's, their hypothesis no longer held valid. Hence, political trends began which challenged their theory.

What Lipset and Rokkan failed to take into consideration was that the social order, which evidently based on the stable economic structure, was actually based on a shared cultural belief system. As a group, citizens of the West have collectively been drawn through the World War 1, the Great Depression, and then World War 2. These cataclysmic events shaped the value system of entire generations. Collectively the citizens believed in similar ideals because they had experiences similar life events, and shared a similar social and religious ethic. When these commonalities began to degrade in the late 60's and 70's, the freeze hypothesis also began to degrade, showing the fallacy of its foundational assumptions.

Notwithstanding these criticisms, a case for political continuity can be made, since continuity can also be conceived of in terms of loyalty to political ideals. Such a distinction between parties and ideals has been crucial to understanding of political continuity in Western European party systems. Since Lipset and Rokkan put forth their famous "freezing hypothesis," claiming that "the party systems of the 1960s reflect, with few but significant exceptions, the cleavage structures of the 1920s" there has been debate concerning the degree to which Western European party systems have exhibited long-term stability. (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967)

Since the mid-1920s, party systems in Western democracies have developed around the cleavages generated by the modern secular state and industrial society. When the initial impact of these forces subsided, Western Europe saw a period of political stability which was reflected in the basic continuity in electoral results from the 1940s until the beginning of the 1970s (Rose and Urwin 1970). The electoral volatility that many scholars have seen since then has, however, challenged this pattern of stability. The literature on new politics, for instance, takes the value change hypothesis as the point of departure for the explanation of electoral instability (Dalton et al. 1984). As a result, the traditional structure of cleavages which characterized Western politics has lost some of its significance in favor of a new value-based cleavage along the materialist/post materialist dimension. The traditional left-right schema that lies behind the structure of cleavages has also been affected, and the rise and success of Green parties and the proliferation of alternative electoral lists can be attributed to the increasing prevalence of these new values (Muller-Rommel, 1990).

Much interpretation of mass politics in Western Europe is derived from Rokkan's and Lipset's freezing hypothesis. Although widely accepted and influential, this approach suffers from two problems. First, it pays little attention to the underlying values, as opposed to issues, which inform class and religious. Second, its treatment of the relationship between social divisions and party politics is too deterministic, leaving little room for the human element in political movements, namely political leadership.