(Page 19 of 34) - Value Cleavages and Partisan Conflict: The 2004 American Presidential Election in Comparative Perspective authored by Gunther, Richard., Beck, Paul., Kuan, H.C.. and Smidt, Corwin.

values.

Most commonly, these ideologies are formulated by proponents of sweeping social, political or

economic change, rather than by defenders of the status quo. In the case of Western Europe in the 18th
and early 19th centuries, when classical liberalism was being elaborated as an ideological basis for
opposition to the ancien regime and its replacement by a more individualistic, free-market society, the
old order was not defended in its time by those advancing a persuasive intellectual argument,
notwithstanding a few exceptions (such as the writings of Edmund Burke). Instead, West European
conservatism emerged as a coherent intellectual stance much later (in the 1860s through 1880s), in
reaction against a greatly altered sociopolitical status quo. It was only around the turn of the 20th
century that Christian democratic ideologies--inspired by Rerum Novarum and the corporatist reaction
against both socialism and capitalism--were formulated and disseminated by new Catholic parties.
And the neo-conservative movement only emerged in the late 20th century, largely in reaction against
the social welfare state (and, in the U.S., against abortion and the alleged erosion of "family values").

The other major sociopolitical value clusters that we have identified in this study--Socialism

and Modern Social Democracy--were also perpetuated and disseminated on the basis of ideologies
formulated in the mid 19th to mid 20th centuries in reaction against the excesses of free-market
capitalism. It is noteworthy that the one set of values included in our initial template that has failed to
crystallize into a coherent cluster at the mass level, postmaterialism, lacks a concise ideological
statement of any kind. Indeed, as Kitschelt (1989) and others have noted, "Green" or "Left-libertarian"
movement/parties are extraordinarily heterogeneous and loose aggregations whose members are united
by what they oppose rather than what they propose to put in its place. Thus, the articulation of a clear
ideological statement appears to be a key ingredient in the crystallization of values into the clusters we
have analyzed in this paper.

A third crucial variable is the embrace of that ideology by an organized political party. The

consequence of this institutionalization process is the "freezing" of these patterns of value conflict and
their perpetuation over time. Indeed, once officially adopted as a party's defining principles, it is often
difficult to modify a party's ideology to fit with altered social conditions even when powerful
arguments are advanced about the contemporary irrelevance of the original Weltanschauung
underpinning its programmatic commitments and about the extent to which an outmoded ideological
orientation is alienating potential voters. This point is clearly illustrated by the protracted internal
struggles within West European Socialist parties in the second half of the 20th century. Despite
Anthony Crosland's powerful critique in the 1950s, for example, it was not until four decades later that
the Labour party abandoned its commitment to nationalization of the means of economic production.
Conversely, a second reason for the absence of a coherent or politically relevant postmaterialism
cluster in the preceding waves of analysis is that it has never been embraced and articulated as a
distinctive political ideology by any significant political parties in the countries examined here (with
the partial exception of the Izquierda Unida coalition in Spain). At the same time, many of its core
environmentalist themes and demands for increased citizen participation have been "coopted" by
previously established social-democratic parties, and even by some center-right parties (see
Klingemann et al. 1994). The importance of political parties in institutionalizing these conflicts can be
seen in the fact that even ideologies that had once served as the basis of social movements that moved
millions of persons--such as Anarchism and Anarchosyndicalism in Spain in the 1930s (e.g., Esenwein
1989; Corbin 1993)--may completely disappear if they are not embraced by partisan organizations that
will work to perpetuate them over the following decades.

Thus, our efforts to explain these cross national differences involves three political processes.

The first is historical, in which the principal actors are political and intellectual elites who convert
values and beliefs into overt lines of political conflict. The second is intellectual, in which