8
countries. The religious cleavage has placed a greater role in structuring voter alignments in
these countries, creating a natural barrier to left support and entrenching conservative or
Christian parties in power (in the Spanish case, a conservative authoritarian regime). In these
cases, SD parties faced a different challenge to their British and German counterparts: on the
one hand, establishing their dominance of the left space, on the other, winning support among
Catholic voters. In this respect, deindustrialisation and the decline of the manual working class
actually helped SD parties, by undermining Communist support and allowing them to
concentrate on a catch-all strategy to attract voters across religious lines. Secularisation,
resulting from the same processes of rapid social change and the decline of rural life, diminished
the salience of the religious cleavage, making left-right competition for the middle class
Catholic vote possible. In France, Mitterand’s clever strategy of the Left Union (Union de la
Gauche) favoured the Socialists’ dominance of the left space, and in the French presidential
system made a left majority possible. At the same time, social change in France had weakened
the impact of the religious cleavage, permitting the PS to capture the votes of the more
progressive middle classes. Once in government, the PCF became isolated and the Socialists
were able to use their control of the presidency to establish themselves as the only alternative to
conservatism. In Spain, a similar process took place much more rapidly, as the PCE failed to
win the expected levels of support in trancsitional elections, allowing a ‘Bad Godesberg’ to take
place as early as 1979. Helped by the collapse of a moderate centrist party (UCD) and its
replacement by a postauthoritarian right, the PSOE quickly won a governing majority in 1982.
Here too, a rapid process of secularisation from the 1960s on made the Catholic vote available.
In Italy, the strength of the PCI made a hegemonic strategy impossible for the PSI, which
instead chose to govern with the Christian Democrats (DC), and in the 1980s briefly appeared to
challenge the DC’s dominance of the Italian party system. The dominance of the religious
cleavage has attenuated real class divisions in these countries, making it possible to construct
‘class compromise’ electoral coalitions on the basis of broad notions of political, social and
cultural modernisation.
The themes of modernisation and democratisation have served to mobilise both
workers and progressive emerging sectors of the middle class around projects to reform
archaic and hierarchical state structures and consolidate new social freedoms. In 1980s
France, the decentralisation of the oppressive state power and the vague notion of autogestion
applied to the sphere of production were sufficiently broad themes to unite industrial workers
Convention