Clea
ages: Political
Maor D, Fraser B J 1996 Use of classroom environment
perceptions in evaluating inquiry-based computer assisted
learning. International Journal of Science Education 18: 401–21
Midgley C, Eccles J S, Feldlaufer H 1991 Classroom environ-
ment and the transition to junior high school. In: Fraser B J,
Walberg H J (eds.) Educational En
ironments: E
aluation,
Antecedents and Consequences. Pergamon, London, pp. 113–
39
Moos R H 1974 The Social Climate Scales: An O
er
iew.
Consulting Psychologists Press, Palo Alto, CA
Moos R H, Trickett E J 1987 Classroom En
ironment Scale
manual, 2nd edn. Consulting Psychologists Press, Palo Alto,
CA
Taylor P C, Fraser B J, Fisher D L 1997 Monitoring con-
structivist classroom learning environments. International
Journal of Educational Research 27: 293–302
Tobin K, Fraser B J 1998 Qualitative and quantitative land-
scapes of classroom learning environments. In: Fraser B J,
Tobin K G (eds.) International Handbook of Science Edu-
cation. Kluwer, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, pp. 623–40
Walberg H J, Anderson G J 1968 Classroom climate and
individual learning. Journal of Educational Psychology 59:
414–19
Yarrow A, Millwater J, Fraser B J 1997 Improving university
and primary school classroom environments through pre-
service teachers’ action research. International Journal of
Practical Experiences in Professional Education 1(1): 68–93
Dryden M,, Fraser B J 1996 E
aluating Urban Systemic Reform
Using Classroom Learning En
ironment Instruments. Paper
presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational
Research Association, New York
Fisher D, Henderson D, Fraser B 1997 Laboratory environments
and student outcomes in senior high school biology. American
Biology Teacher 59: 214–19
Fraser B J, McRobbie C J 1995 Science laboratory classroom
environments at schools and universities: A cross-national
study. Educational Research and E
aluation 1: 289–317
McRobbie C J, Fraser B J 1993 Associations between student
outcomes and psychosocial scince environment. Journal of
Educational Research 87: 78–85
Wong W L F, Fraser B J 1996 Environment-attitude associ-
ations in the chemistry laboratory classroom. Research in
Science and Technological Education 14: 91–102
B. J. Fraser
Cleavages: Political
‘Political cleavages’ are political divisions among
citizens rooted in the structure of a given social system.
However, although cleavages are political divisions,
not all political divisions among citizens spring from
structural cleavages. For one to talk of ‘cleavages’
such divisions must be permanent and noncontingent.
They must orient people’s behavior and sense of
belonging stably and constantly. Political cleavages
are the partisan expression of an underlying division
among the members of a given society (whether
national, subnational, or supranational).
1. The Lipset–Rokkan Model
The concept of ‘cleavage’ has been current in the social
sciences for some time, although it was given full
development only in the 1960s by Seymour Martin
Lipset and Stein Rokkan. Both of them political
sociologists by training, Lipset and Rokkan (1967)
sought to redefine and specify the ‘social bases of
politics.’ Writing when structural-functionalism was
at its height—and, therefore, influenced by the
Parsonian theory which assigned to the political
parties the function of encapsulating social conflicts
and stabilizing the social system—they set out to
explain the persistence of party systems in the Euro-
pean democracies. In the 1960s, in fact, those systems
still displayed features similar to those that had been
institutionalized at the beginning of the century. Not
surprisingly, their explanation was called the theory of
the ‘freezing’ of the European party systems.
Their method was primarily historical–sociological
in so far as it connected existing political divisions in
the European countries with the principal cleavages
that had opened up in the course of their development,
from the birth of the nation-state in the sixteenth
century to its full democratic maturation in the
twentieth. The specific political cleavages that gave
rise to the modern party systems accordingly were seen
to be the result of two great historical processes: the
one that had bred national revolutions (and, therefore,
the formation of the modern European nation-states),
and the one that had engendered the industrial
revolution (and, therefore, the formation of modern
European capitalist systems).
National revolutions had created two structural
divisions: (a) between the center and the periphery, or
between the groups and areas that sought to impose a
single public authority on a given territory and the
groups and areas which asserted their traditional
autonomy against such centralizing pressures; (b)
between the lay state and the church, or between
groups which sought to separate temporal from
religious authority and groups intent on preserving the
intimate connection between them. The industrial
revolution in its turn created two further structural
divisions: (a) between agriculture and industry, or
between groups and areas whose survival depended on
traditional activities and groups and areas which
endeavored to remove traditional constraints in order
to foster the growth of new activities and production
methods; (b) between capital and labor, or between
the groups that dominated the new industrial structure
and the workers, whose only possession was their
capacity to perform labor.
In Europe, only the parties that reflected these
cleavages were able to survive, that is, reproduce
themselves electorally and institutionally. The in-
stitutionalized interaction among these parties gave
rise to the modern party systems which, in individual
European countries, and in forms that differed from
1987
Clea
ages: Political
one country to another, still conserved in the mid-
twentieth century the cleavages that had arisen in
previous ones.
2. Subsequent Debate
The Lipset–Rokkan model heavily influenced the
debate conducted during the 1960s on the political
parties. The discussion started from the premise that
political parties were necessary to make democracy
safe (i.e., stable), as Schattschneider (1948) had already
argued. However, the model was not endorsed uni-
versally, at least in its entirety. In a study of a small
Scandinavian democracy, Eckstein (1966) pointed out
the existence of multiple political divisions, identifying
ones due to specific disagreements on particular public
policies, others due to cultural divergences on inter-
pretations of political life, and yet others arising from
segmental cleavages caused by objective social dif-
ferences. Again in 1966, Daalder examined the small
democracies of continental Europe and pointed out
the existence of political divisions due to factors (for
instance, the nature of the political regime or the
concept of nationality) other than those envisaged by
the Lipset–Rokkan model.
But it was Sartori (1969) who challenged most
radically the Lipset–Rokkan model, by reversing its
causal logic. For Sartori, it was not social divisions
that encouraged the birth of parties; rather, it was the
parties that gave visibility and identity to a particular
structure of social divisions. In short, Sartori argued,
political sociology (and political science) should take
the place of sociology of politics if partisan politics in
the European democracies were to be understood
properly. Lipset (1970) himself acknowledged the
ability of parties to exacerbate politically a cleavage
that might socially be in decline. Nonetheless, he
reiterated that a social basis was necessary for a party
to exist. Thus, while for Lipset and Rokkan social
cleavages were necessary, though not sufficient, for the
formation of parties and of party systems, for Sartori
they were neither necessary nor sufficient because
politics can only be conducted independently of other
social spheres. This autonomy of the parties from
society had already been shown by Kirchheimer (1966)
in his celebrated study in which he investigated the
transition from the ‘party of social integration’ to the
‘catch-all party,’ that is, a party able to represent
diverse classes and social groups electorally.
From the 1970s onwards, partly due to the de-
velopment of more sophisticated techniques of social
research, the debate moved in a more microempirical
and less macrohistorical direction. The decade saw
numerous studies of electoral behavior, although their
results were equivocal. While early studies like Rose
(1974) showed the relative decline of politics based on
social cleavages (or ‘cleavage politics,’ as it came to be
called), the magnitude and implications of this decline
1988
were given various interpretations by scholars. The
1992 study by Franklin suggested that the decline of
cleavage politics was ineluctable, those of Inglehart
(1977), Dalton et al. (1984) and subsequent studies
until seemingly showed that cleavage politics were
evolving in a new direction so that ‘cultural’ cleavages
were now taking the place of fading social cleavages
and reorienting electoral and political behavior.
For these authors, the new structure of divisions
might indeed have a ‘social basis,’ but it was manifest
in a clash of values: between industrial values (in favor
of the quantitative growth of affluence) on the one
hand, and postindustrial ones (which gave priority to
the quality of life and the protection of the environ-
ment) on the other. Associated with each side were
socioeconomic groups and geographical areas, but the
clash involved distinct (and opposed) cultural con-
ceptions and lifestyles. Of course, there was no lack of
criticism of this approach—especially by Bartolini and
Mair (1990)—given that it emptied Lipset and
Rokkan’s original concept of cleavage of much of its
meaning. For this reason, Bartolini and Mair pro-
posed the following redefinition of the notion: (a)
empirically, a cleavage must be definable in terms of
social structure; (b) normatively, a cleavage is a system
of values which gives a sense of collective identity to a
social group; (c) behaviorally, a cleavage is manifest in
the interaction among political actors. Thus redefined,
the concept of cleavage is broader in its compass and
becomes a means to order social relations.
3. The Freezing of Clea
ages
Sociologists and economists also joined the debate.
Goldthorpe (1996), for example, found that trad-
itional social divisions were still conditioning political
allegiances and electoral choices at the end of the
twentieth century. Other studies appeared which,
although they extended the concept of social cleavage,
continued to frame it in structural terms. Lijphart
(1977), in his study of the small consociative de-
mocracies of continental Europe, and then in his
analyses of the established democracies (Lijphart
1999), showed that ethnic divisions performed the
same function in structuring identity and behavior as
did the other social divisions of the Lipset–Rokkan
model. These divisions, too, sprang from the long
historical process that had led to the formation of the
nation-state. Thereafter, they had continued to pre-
dominate despite the divisions created by the process
of industrialization. In the nation-states, the divisions
between agriculture and industry, and between capital
and labor were absorbed by more basic ethnic-
linguistic cleavages. According to Lijphart, the diverse
nature of these cleavages lay at the origin of the two
principal models of democracy (what he called ‘con-
sensual’ and ‘majoritarian’) that developed in the West
after the World War II.

The model of consensual democracy based on the
inclusion in the executive of all the country’s main
ethnic groups proved highly effective (in stabilizing
democracy). It was accordingly used by authors
(starting from Sartori and his studies of party systems
in the 1970s) to investigate the workings of national
societies connoted by identity divisions, albeit based
on ideology rather than ethnicity or language. The
reference here is to the postwar European democracies
distinguished by the presence of powerful communist
parties. Even these democracies were consensual in
nature, although their operation was sustained, not by
inclusive coalitions in the executive (access to which
was barred to communist parties, owing to the
geopolitical cleavages created by the Cold War), but
by consensual practices in parliament. However, while
these ideological cleavages proved unstable with the
passage of time, this was not the case of ethnic ones. It
seemed, indeed, that the model of consensual democ-
racy had ended up by ‘freezing’ ethnic allegiances,
though managing to cushion their impact.
The reasons why party systems were frozen in the
postwar European democracies were expressly in-
vestigated by Mair and Bartolini (1990). These two
authors examined three different hypotheses with
regard to the freezing process. First, it may involve the
freezing of social cleavages, that is, the stabilization of
the social structure from which the parties draw
legitimation for their political action. Second, the
freezing may be due to the institutionalization of the
political parties, albeit accompanied by the fading of
the social divisions that had prompted their formation
(here by ‘institutionalization’ is meant the parties’
ability to stand as the only practicable electoral
choices). Third, the freezing may be due to the
stabilization of the party system as such, or put
otherwise, the institutionalization of the system of
interactions among the main political actors. Mair and
Bartolini seem to suggest that the third of these
hypotheses is the most plausible, given that both the
hypothesis of the freezing of social cleavages and that
of the freezing of political parties must admit to so
many exceptions that they are not falsifiable. In short,
for both authors a distinction must be drawn between
the freezing of party systems and the freezing of
individual parties.
The freezing hypothesis has also been discussed in
terms of voting behavior. Several surveys have
sought—using different indicators—to collect reliable
data on the stability and instability of voting choices.
Many scholars, from Pederson (1983) to Maguire
(1983) and especially Bartolini (2000), have shown
that rates of aggregate electoral volatility were rela-
tively low until the 1980s: which corroborated Lipset
and Rokkan’s original contention that continuity
rather than change was the distinguishing feature of
partisan politics in Europe. These studies came in for
criticism, of course, mainly on the grounds that
electoral stability does not necessarily coincide with
Clea
ages: Political
stable interaction among the political parties, and that
stability may conceal processes of dealignment and
realignment sufficient to gainsay the logic of the
Lipset–Rokkan model.
4. Between Europe and America
The theory of cleavages has been developed on the
basis of the experiences of the Western European
countries, with no reference to the other great model
of democracy: that of the United States. And yet it was
precisely in the United States that modern political
parties and party systems were invented. Indeed, the
myth of American exceptionalism has been fostered
by this European neglect; a neglect motivated by the
belief that American society, unlike those of European
countries, is based on cross-cutting cleavages which—
as Lipset maintained as early as 1963—are unable to
produce stable divisions among citizens. This absence
of cleavage politics, the argument ran, gave rise to the
depolarization of partisan conflict in the United States
that underpinned the stability of ‘American democ-
racy.’ In short, the more cleavages multiply and
interweave, the more numerous the divisions among
citizens become, and the safer democracy grows.
And yet, as Bensel (1987) showed, the situation in
the United States was not so clear-cut, for that
country, too, displayed, and still does, a stable political
cleavage; sectional rather than social and cultural,
although it has latterly acquired these features as well.
This is the political cleavage between states and
regional areas expressed in two radically different
conceptions of the balance of powers to be struck
between the states and the center of the federation.
And it should not be forgotten that this fracture
provoked one of the most violent and bloody civil
wars of the modern age. It is around this cleavage that
the various party systems that have arisen since the
foundation of American republic have structured
themselves.
In the light of the postnational experience of Europe
at the end of the twentieth century, the case of the
United States appears less exceptional than it did in
the past. This is because the process of European
integration has generated a sectional divide among
geo-economic areas of the continent which cuts across
the traditional (in Europe) party-political axis ranging
from right to left. And in this case, too, the new
contraposition has taken the form of a different
interpretation of the balance of powers that should be
established between the European and national in-
stitutions. Can European integration be regarded as a
further historical cleavage—in addition to those
singled out by the Lipset–Rokkan model—destined to
produce another political structural cleavage? If so,
the cleavage theory might be updated, this time
bridging the European and American experiences.
1989
Clea
ages: Political
See also: Conflict\Consensus; Conflict Sociology;
Ethnic Conflict, Geography of; Ethnic Conflicts; Party
Systems; Pluralism; Political Geography; Political
Sociology; Race Relations in the United States,
Politics of
Bibliography
Bartolini S 2000 The Class Clea
age: The Political Mobilization
of the European Left, 1860–1980. Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, UK
Bartolini S, Mair P 1990 Identity, Competition and Electoral
A
ailability. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
Bensel R F 1987 Sectionalism and American Political De
elop-
ment: 1880–1980. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison,
WI
Daalder H 1966 Parties, elites and political development(s) in
Western Europe. In: LaPalombara J, Weiner M (eds.) Political
Parties and Political De
elopment. Princeton University Press,
Princeton, NJ
Dalton R J, Flanagan C S, Beck P A 1984 Electoral Change in
Ad
anced Industrial Democracies: Realignment or Dealign-
ment? Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ
Eckstein H 1966 Di
ision and Cohesion in Democracy: A Study of
Norway. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ
Franklin M T, Mackie T, Valen H (eds.) 1992 Electoral Change:
Responses to Social and Attitudinal Structures in Western
Countries. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
Goldthorpe J H 1996 Class and politics in advanced industrial
societies. In: Lee D J, Turner B S (eds.) Conflict about Class:
Debating Inequality in Late Industrialism. Longman, London
Inglehart R 1977 The Silent Re
olution. Changing Values and
Political Styles among Western Publics. Princeton University
Press, Princeton, NJ
Kirchheimer O 1966 The transformation of the Western Euro-
pean Party systems. In: LaPalombara J, Weiner M (eds.)
Political Parties and Political De
elopment. Princeton Uni-
versity Press, Princeton, NJ
Knutsen O 1988 The impact of structural and ideological party
cleavages in Western European democracies: A comparative
empirical analysis. British Journal of Political Science 18:
323–52
Lijphart A 1977 Democracy in Plural Societies: A Comparati
e
Exploration. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT
Lijphart A 1999 Patterns of Democracy. Yale University Press,
New Haven, CT
Lipset S M 1963 Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics.
Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD
Lipset S M 1970 Re
olution and Counterre
olution. Anchor
Books, New York
Lipset S M, Rokkan S 1967 Cleavage structures, party systems
and voter alignments: An introduction. In: Lipset S M,
Rokkan S (eds.) Party Systems and Voter Alignments. Free
Press, New York
Maguire M 1983 Is there still persistence? Electoral change in
Western Europe, 1948–1979. In: Daalder H, Mair P (eds.)
Western European Party Systems Continuity and Change.
Sage, Beverly Hills, CA
Pederson M N 1983 Changing patterns of electoral volatility in
European party systems, 1948–1977. In: Daalder H, Mair P
(eds.) Western European Party Systems. Continuity and
Change. Sage, Beverly Hills, CA
Rose R 1974 Electoral Beha
iour: A Comparati
e Handbook.
Free Press, New York
1990
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences
Sartori G 1969 From sociology of politics to political sociology.
In: Lipset S M (ed.) Politics and the Social Sciences. Oxford
University Press, New York
Sartori G 1976 Parties and Party Systems. Cambridge University
Press, New York
Schattschneider E E 1948 The Struggle for Party Go
ernment.
University of Maryland, College Park, MD
S. Fabbrini
Copyright # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd.
All rights reserved.
Climate Change and Health
This article outlines the potential impacts on human
health of climate change due to the accumulation of
greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere. It de-
scribes the range of potential mechanisms by which
health could be affected and the difficulties of esti-
mating the magnitude of such effects. It concludes
with a brief discussion of how, not withstanding the
need to prevent climate change as far as possible,
humankind will have to adapt to changing climate if
the adverse effects are to be minimized.
1. Background
1.1 Climate Change
Human activities, particularly the burning of fossil
fuels, but also changes in land use, are leading to the
accumulation of greenhouse gases such as carbon
dioxide and methane in the earth’s atmosphere.
The resulting increase in ‘radiative forcing’ is leading
to warming of the earth’s surface. The United Nations
set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC)—a multidisciplinary body of scientific advi-
sers, which in its third assessment report forecast an
increase in the average global temperature of
1n4–5n8 mC between 1990 and 2100 (IPCC 2001). There
are a number of sources of uncertainty in projections
of future climate, including changes in greenhouse gas
emissions and concentrations, the sensitivity of climate
to greenhouse gases, and the impact of modulating
processes, such as the short-term cooling effects of
aerosols as a result of industrial emissions. However, it
does appear likely that the rate of climate change over
the twenty-first century will be far greater than any
natural changes in world climate over the past 10,000
years. There has been substantial warming since 1856,
when records began, with particularly rapid increases
in temperatures since about 1980. The warmest year
on record was 1998, partly as a result of the marked El
Nin4 o which occurred over 1997–8. In its second
assessment report the IPCC concluded that the balance
of evidence suggested that the impact of human
ISBN: 0-08-043076-7