Regional and Religious Support of Political Parties and Effects on their Issue Positions
| Published date | 01 October 1989 |
| Date | 01 October 1989 |
| Author | Kenneth Janda |
| DOI | 10.1177/019251218901000404 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
349-
Regional
and
Religious
Support
of
Political
Parties
and
Effects
on
their
Issue
Positions
KENNETH JANDA
ABSTRACT.
Political
sociology
assumes
that
social
cleavages
are
manifested
in
political
alignments.
This
research
focuses
on
the
cleavage
factors
of
region
and
religion
in
group
support
of
national
political
parties.
It
discusses
problems
in
analyzing
these
factors
across
cultures
and
illustrates
the
problems
by
analyzing
social
support
for
approximately
150
parties
in
53
nations
in
all
cultural-geographical
areas
of
the
world.
Regional
and
religious
patterns
of
support
clearly
affect
parties’
positions
on
issues.
Regionally
homogeneous
parties
tend
to
oppose
national
integration,
and
religiously
homogeneous
parties
tend
to
oppose
the
secularization
of
society.
Moreover,
parties’
positions
on
secularization
also
depend
heavily
on
their
specific
religious
composition.
In
their
pioneering
work,
Lipset
and
Rokkan
(1967)
contend
that
patterns
of
support
for
political
parties
may
be
determined
by
four
decisive
lines
of
cleavage:
center-
periphery,
state-church,
land-industry,
and
owner-worker.
This
formulation
of
cleavages
is
based
on
political
issues
rather
than
sociological
divisions.
Lipset
and
Rokkan
also
refer
to
political
alignments
based
solely
on
indicators
of
cultural
diversity,
such
as
region,
class,
and
religious
denomination
(p.
3).
Nordlinger
(1972)
distinguishes
social
divisions
based
on
class
(wealth,
income,
occupation,
and
education)
from
those
based
on
communal
factors
(race,
tribe,
religion,
language,
and
ethnicity).
Nordlinger’s
dichotomy
needs
to
be
supplemented
by
spatial
factors,
such
as
region
and
urban-rural
place.
Although
there
are
probably
other bases
of
social
divisions,
this
is
already
an
impressive
list
of factors
to
study
for
their
effects
on
party
support
and
issue
positions
across
the
world.
The
Study
of
Social
and
Political
Cleavages
Of
all
the
possible
bases of
social
cleavage,
social
class
(in
some
variant)
has
loomed
largest
in
the
analysis
of
party
support.
Lipset
once
claimed,
&dquo;On
a
world
scale,
the
principal
generalization
which
can
be
made
is
that
parties
are
primarily
based
on
either
the
lower
classes
or
the
middle
and
upper
classes&dquo;
(1960:
220).
Research
on
the
cross-national
analysis
of
party
support
by
social
class,
compared
with
research
on
communal
factors,
is
aided
by
two
facts:
350
1.
The
influences
of
social
class
is
pervasive-virtually
every
society
is
divided
into
social
classes.
In
contrast,
communal
factors
are
inherently
limited
in
scope;
not
every
society
can
be
meaningfully
divided
into
racial,
tribal,
religious,
language,
and
ethnic
groupings.
Where
such
divisions
are
meaningful,
they
may
not
travel
well
across
societies.
Religion,
for
example,
is
politically
important
in
India,
Lebanon,
and
France-but
in
quite
different
ways.
2.
Social
class
can be
measured
on
an
ordered
metric-from
lower
to
upper.
Ordinality
is
obvious
when
wealth,
income,
or
education
are
used
as
indicators
of
class,
but
even
occupation
(normally
a
nominal
variable)
can
be
ordered
for
cross-national
analysis
(low
to
high
prestige).
In
contrast,
communal
factors
are
inherently
nominal
variables
and
resist
ordered
classification
even
in
a
single
society.
Spatial
factors
(region
and
urban-rural)
fall
somewhere
between
class
and
communal
factors
in
their
tractability
for
cross-national
analysis.
Spatial
variables
apply
to
virtually
every
country,
for
only
the
smallest
(e.g.,
San
Marino)
lack
regional
or
urban-rural
variation.
But
the
two
variables
present
different
problems
in
measurement.
Region
is
the
quintessential
nominal
variable-deriving
its
meaning
for
political
analysis
from
the
geography,
history,
and
administrative
structure
peculiar
to
each
country.
Consequently,
regions
that
have
similar
names-for
example,
&dquo;south&dquo;
and
&dquo;north&dquo;-usually
lack
any
basis
for
comparison
across
nations.
So
it
makes
little
sense
to
compare
parties
with
strong
support
in
the
south
of
the
United
States
even
with
those
that
are
strong
in
the
south
of
England-much
less
in
the
south
of
India.
On
the
other
hand,
the
urban-rural
variable
is
inherently
orderable,
and
the
ordinal
categories
travel
well
in
analysis
across
nations.
It
is
reasonable
to
compare
parties
with
strong
support
in
urban
areas
in
the
United
States
with
those
that
have
strong
support
in
cities
in
Britain.
However,
it
is
more
difficult
to
obtain
data
on
party
support
by
urban
and
rural
areas
than
party
support
by
region.
Because
election
results
are
usually
reported
by
administrative
districts,
they
can
almost
always
be
aggregated
into
regions
to
measure
party
support.
But
election
results
cannot
be
aggregated
into
homogeneous
urban
and
rural
areas
as
easily.
This
paper
addresses
the
cross-national
analysis
of
party
support
by
region
and
religion.
Both
types
of
variable
are
difficult
to
employ
across
nations
because
they
are
stubbornly
nominal,
but
they
differ
in
their
tractability
in
other
ways.
Whereas
suitable
data
are
more
readily
available
for
region
than
for
religion,
religious
classifications
have
more
capacity
for
cross-national
comparisons
than
regional
categories.
Before
analyzing
parties
across
the
world
for
regional
and
religious
support,
we
would
benefit
from
reviewing
major
studies
of
party
support
in
Western
nations,
where
the
data
are
better
but
the
scope
more
limited.
Party Support
in
Western
Europe
I will
briefly
review
three
studies
of
the
social
bases
of
party
support
in
Western
Europe.
The
approaches
and
findings
of
these
studies
provide
background
for
a
broader
analysis
of
region
and
religion
in
party
support.
Social
Cohesion
in
Western
Parties.
In
their
pioneering
work,
Rose
and
Urwin
(1969)
analyzed
social
cohesion
of
76
political
parties
in
17
Western
nations
on
five
differentiators:
religious,
regional,
communal
(ethnic
and
linguistic),
urban-rural,
and
class.
Among
these
possible
bases
of
social
division,
they
found
only
region
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