The Rise of New Cleavages and their Impact on Voting Choices in Denmark

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Region: Western Europe, grade: 1,7, University of Copenhagen (Faculty of Social Science - Department of Political Science), course: 'Scandinavian Political Systems', language: English, abstract: The cleavages of Western Europe have received constant attention from scholars. In the particular case of Denmark, previous and recent publications from several researchers, such as Andersen ('The Decline of Class Voting Revisited', 1992), Borre ('Old and New Politics', 1995), Knutsen ('Voter and Social Cleavages', 2004) and Stubager ('The Education Cleavage', 2006), have been devoted to the decline of class voting over the last 15 years. All these authors agree with the assumption that cleavages based on traditional social conflicts have been decreasing in significance and that it fails to explain voters preferences in today's modern Denmark. Instead of that, new cleavages, like sector employment or even new value orientations, decide to a larger extent how citizens cast their votes. In addition to this and compared to the past, 'New Politics' issues like environment or immigration have now a deeper impact on voting choices and are therefore challenging the 'Old Politics' dimension is dominated by economic issues. The purpose of this essay is to enhance the understanding of new cleavages in Denmark by producing comprehensive answers to the following questions: What has caused the rise of new cleavages and how are they characterized? How do the new cleavages and 'New Politics' influence the voting choice? A problem of writing this paper has been the lack of current data, since most of the analyses to which this paper refers are based on figures until the 1990s. Thus, we can only assume that a discussion about new cleavages in Denmark is still being valid. The paper is divided into two parts. Before addressing the new cleavages, we first take a short look at the cleavage theory proposed by Rokkan and Lipset regarding to the consequences of the 'Landslide Election' from 1973 in part I. This sets the stage for the later analysis and provides us an understanding in the way that political issues have been generated. Part II is dedicated to the main topic of this paper, the new cleavages and 'New Politics' in Denmark, where we consider not only the cleavages and values but also new decisive issues - environment and immigration.Finally, we examine the importance of new cleavages and 'New Politics' in Denmark by focusing on the voting choices before we summarize our findings.