Introduction and Motivation:

Social scientists and philosophers have shown increased interest in the concept of descriptive representation. Indeed, the identities and life experiences of those doing the representing may be critical for enacting the preferences of those being represented. This is especially the case for historically marginalized groups — upper-class, educated men may simply fail to adequately represent lower-class, uneducated, or women voters. In addition to considerations of fairness, there is growing recognition that descriptive representation can improve policy outcomes, such as service delivery or trust in government.

However, the study of descriptive representation has been hampered by data availability. Identifying simple correlations across the world’s democracies — for example, between proportions of working-class legislators and levels of social welfare provision — has hitherto been impossible.

In “The Global Legislators Database,” Nicholas Carnes, Joshua Ferrer, Miriam Golden, Esme Lillywhite, Noam Lupu, and Eugenia Nazrullaeva introduce the largest dataset of biographic and demographic information on national legislators ever assembled. GLD will enable scholars to assess just how much voters elect those with life experiences resembling their own. The authors compile information on five descriptive variables across 97 democracies: legislators’ party affiliation, gender, age, highest level of education, and previous occupation (to assess their social class). By contrast, prior datasets have focused only on heads of state or cabinet members, or on only a selection of more developed democracies.

Some questions around descriptive representation would seem to have intuitive answers: Wouldn’t developed countries have more women representatives, or wouldn’t women legislators feature less prominently in right-wing parties? Scholars can now hope to do more than merely gesture at answers.

Characteristics, Validity Checks, and Applications:

GLD comprises countries that (a) have a population of over 300,000 and (b) meet the standard for what Freedom House calls “Electoral Democracy” — having some minimum of political rights and civil liberties. Excluding six cases of data availability constraints, this yields 97 countries, including India, the United States, Brazil, Mexico, Nigeria, and the Philippines. Scholars of Pakistan, Bangladesh, or Turkey — who would likely characterize these countries as authoritarian during the 2015-17 time period — will be pleased that the authors chose a more forgiving measure of democracy.

Biographic data is drawn from the national legislature in unicameral countries and the lower chamber in bicameral countries. (By contrast, upper chambers are sometimes indirectly appointed or hereditary, which sheds less light on whether voters choose descriptively similar representatives.) This yields over 19,000 individuals who held office during at least one legislative session in 2015, 2016, and 2017. GLD has remarkably complete data for the five variables mentioned above: age and education data are presented for over 90% of legislators in the dataset, for over 93% as regards occupation, and nearly 100% for gender.

In order to assess GLD’s validity, the authors compare select variables to those in comparable datasets. For example, the gender variable is compared with gender data from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project, which shows that the two measures are nearly identical. So too is the age data nearly identical to an index from 15 affluent democracies.
 

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Figure 1. Shares of women legislators in the GLD and V-Dem. Note: Bahamas, Belize, Fiji, and Kosovo are omitted because of missing data in the V-Dem.
 

For categories like education and prior occupation — where comparable data are unavailable — the authors conduct “face validity” tests: these draw on our intuitions that legislators are, for example, mostly educated and not working class. And indeed, these intuitions are borne out in the distributions of GLD data. In terms of total coverage, GLD includes information on more legislators than the comparable Global Leadership Project database for all but two countries, and in many cases, the differences are large.
 

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Figure 3. Distributions of legislator traits in the GLD. Note: Age is calculated at the time of election. Higher education includes levels beyond primary and secondary education (Bachelors, Masters, PhD, LLB, LLM, JD, MD, and short-cycle tertiary). Data on educational attainments for legislators is unavailable for Côte d’Ivoire.
 

The authors then use GLD in application to a number of questions for which scholars have lacked global data. First, some have hypothesized that in legislatures with more (a) uneducated, (b) female, and (c) working-class representatives, incumbency rates will be lower. This is because individuals from these three groups might have a harder time overcoming challenges relating to expertise, sexism, and fundraising, respectively. Correlating GLD data with a global reelection database, the authors find only evidence for (b), suggesting that women may face higher barriers to remaining in office. These are only correlations, but they point to fruitful areas for exploration: why might women face unique barriers, and what distinguishes countries with lower versus higher barriers?
 

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Figure 5. Re-election rates by years of education, gender, and occupational background. Note: The share of working-class legislators is zero for six countries that are dropped from the figure: Albania, Botswana, Cyprus, Estonia, Guatemala, and Mongolia.
 

A second application involves public financing of elections, which is thought to favor more working-class legislators who would have a harder time fundraising. Correlating V-Dem data on public financing with the GLD variable on prior occupation, however, the authors find limited evidence for this conjecture. Finally, some have proposed that countries with a stronger rule of law would favor a higher proportion of lawyers in the national legislature. Looking again at GLD prior occupation data alongside V-Dem rule of law data, the authors find limited evidence for this hypothesis.

These varied applications point to how the Global Legislators Database can serve as a valuable resource for scholars interested in the causes and consequences of descriptive representation. Although the GLD covers only a single point in time, it can serve as a bedrock for additional data-collection efforts. In addition to expanding its temporal coverage, scholars may also wish to gather data on upper chambers. Especially in ethnically diverse countries like Bosnia and Herzegovina, upper chambers are intended to mirror the descriptive composition of specific regions. However, it may be the case that ethnic representatives are still vastly more wealthy or educated than their constituents, thus impeding their ability to represent.

*Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.

Motivation

Political parties have long reflected  dividing lines between groups in a society, often called political ‘cleavages’. Examples include workers vs. business owners, Protestants vs. Catholics, and urban vs. rural constituents. Civil society organizations (CSOs) — such as unions, churches, and chambers of commerce — have historically shaped the content and strength of these cleavages.

However, both CSOs and cleavages have changed in recent decades. For one, traditional cleavages have declined in importance, and new divides have emerged, such as between the so-called winners and losers of globalization or between those on one side or the other of the culture wars. In addition, formal CSOs have seen declining membership and reduced political influence, while informal groups and more episodic activism have grown. While CSOs and political parties used to have highly formalized relationships, they now tend to engage with each other more opportunistically and sometimes antagonistically. It seems clear that CSOs continue to influence political cleavages — both old and new — in the 21st century. But how exactly does this occur?

Contribution

In “Cleavage Theory Meets Civil Society,” Alex Mierke-Zatwarnicki, Endre Borbáth, and Swen Hutter examine the varied historical and contemporary relationships between CSOs, cleavages, and political parties in Western Europe. The authors develop a general framework for understanding the relationship between CSOs and cleavage development, providing insights into how contemporary politics reflects long-term changes in the structure of civil society. 

The paper is set against social science research on cleavages, which can be divided into two broad streams. First, classical scholarship emphasized the importance of early 20th-century mass associations, such as unions, in shaping cleavages and party politics. By contrast, newer work, written against the backdrop of a changing CSO landscape, has viewed CSOs as largely irrelevant, arguing that opposition parties shape cleavages via direct interactions with voters. Neither body of previous work provides a compelling framework for understanding how contemporary CSOs — given their fragmentation, informationalization, and politicization -- matter for cleavages.

The authors also shed light on the phenomenon of polarization, which is a key part of democratic backsliding. Indeed, electorates are polarized around several cleavages — economic, religious, and cultural — that populist leaders have used to justify excluding their opponents from politics, portraying them as existential threats to a specific way of life.

Processes and Mechanisms

The authors suggest that cleavage development can be seen as the culmination of three processes, which CSOs may influence in key ways. The first is “group formation,” which concerns how individuals come to identify as workers, congregants, or otherwise. The second process is “political institutionalization,” which entails cleavages being embodied in party competition. The third is “political stabilization,” whereby cleavages are reinforced over time by parties.
 

Table 1. Role of civil society across stages of cleavage development.
 

To understand how CSOs might shape these three processes, the authors outline two mechanisms. The first is “linkage,” whereby CSOs communicate group demands and pressure political parties to represent them. Linkage is hypothesized to be more important during the latter processes of institutionalization and stabilization; it was historically important in group formation but less so today because of the aforementioned decline of formal CSOs.

The second mechanism is “social closure,” which concerns how group boundaries are solidified. CSOs are hypothesized to contribute to social closure by bringing group members together and organizing them around shared demands, increasing their sense of ingroup identification. This mechanism is important for group formation as well as  political stabilization.

CSOs still appear to facilitate linkage and social closure, albeit in different ways than in the early 20th century. For example, CSOs are less likely to have formal links to parties but continue to exert pressure by organizing around individual issues, candidates, and elections. Voters’ relationships to CSOs are also more varied, creating divisions within the electorate between highly-active individuals who have a strong sense of group identity and people who are less ‘anchored’ to the cleavage. The authors also hypothesize that some of these dynamics may produce asymmetric changes across the left and right, as the strength and tactics of CSOs vary.
 

Table 2. Implications of the changing structure of civil society.
 

Cross-National and Case Study Evidence

The authors then analyze cross-national data on political parties and voters in Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. One data source concerns the extent to which political parties are tied to CSOs and whether they receive large-scale CSO donations. A second source looks at whether party supporters are active in CSOs. Preliminary findings point to important differences between old, class-based parties (especially Social Democrats) and newer parties, with the latter much less tied to CSOs. However, within the new party families, Green parties are more tightly linked to CSOs than far-right parties, but there also exists variation within far-right parties. These patterns demand a more fine-grained analysis of specific cases.
 

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Figure 2. Members of civil society organizations among the electorate of political parties in Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.

Note: The figure is based on the Joint EVS/WVS 2017-2022 Dataset (2022). It uses the battery of membership in organizations and partisanship questions. In the WVS, partisanship is measured with ‘Which party would you vote for?’; in the EVS, with ‘Which political party appeals to you most?’ For this figure, the two items are treated as functional equivalents. The percentage of members is calculated from all respondents indicating sympathy towards the respective party.
 

Finally, the authors qualitatively analyze three distinct cases: one New Left party and both old and new far-right populist parties — the German Green Party, the Swiss People’s Party (SVP), and the Alternative for Germany (AfD). Their analysis reveals key differences as regards the importance of CSOs in fostering linkage and social closure. CSOs played a key role in consolidating the Greens and SVP, whereas in the case of AfD, antipathy from German CSOs helped generate a more outsider identity.

The Greens emerged via linkages with left-libertarian social movements in the 1970s and 80s. This included groups supportive of environmental protection and feminism and opposed to nuclear proliferation. CSOs provided ideas and personnel, which helped build a sense of social closure among party supporters. This identity still persists in spite of the subsequent fragmentation of civil society.

By contrast, SVP emerged through connections to Swiss farmers' associations, rural economic networks, and local interest groups. SVP has been radicalizing since the 1990s, becoming one of Europe’s most successful far-right parties and aligning itself with Euroscepticism. SVP’s long history of rural and community penetration has helped strengthen social closure among its electorate.

Finally, AfD emerged in a more fragmented context, via its ties to right-wing protest networks. The party was a top-down vehicle that organized in response to what it saw as Germany’s mismanagement of the Eurozone crisis. AfD lacks dense connections to CSOs and has instead built informal and often volatile alliances with protesters. Many German CSOs — as well as German society more generally — explicitly oppose AfD, which has ironically helped AfD build an outsider identity because its supporters feel isolated and stigmatized.

The case studies vividly illustrate how varied CSO relationships shape cleavages and partisanship in three of the most important Western European parties.

*Research-in-Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.