Points to ponder:

• There are some critical concepts developed in this chapter
  • A state is a physical political unit, with borders, which is sovereign (compare with Danziger: 110; and 114-15 in a different formulation)
    • Note that this conceptualization of a state is different from the everyday one used in the United States, which is a reminder that scholars often have specialized ways of using terms
  • Sovereignty is defined as being subject to no higher level of authority, being the ultimate source of authority over some population or area (in this case, the physical area of the state)
    • Note that an absolute monarch is referred to as the Sovereign; an absolute monarch has ultimate authority over his or her subjects but is not subject to the authority of another
    • Sovereignty is a legal notion that states are autonomous, not subject to the legal or moral authority of another entity, but that is not to say that states are truly autonomous because they may well be, indeed typically are, influenced politically, economically, militarily, or culturally by other states
  • Within states one will find a variety of institutions and practices
    • Institutions are organizations, some of them informal, of people who interact and engage in some social function
      • Examples would include such things are businesses and banks (economic institutions, generally), "churches," schools, and, as an example of an informal social institution, the class or social status system
      • Many times, when you think of an institution you imagine a particular kind of building--if I say religious institutions you will imagine a church building, or if I say courts or judicial institutions an image of a courthouse will probably come to your mind
    • Practices are the regular, routine ways in which members of institutions behave
      • Religious institutions typically have a formal rite through which new members become formally affiliated with the faith
      • Many religious institutions have a way of disciplining members who deviate from orthodox tenets (for example, excommunication or shunning)
    • In political science, we are interested in political institutions and practices, in particular in the institution of government
      • Government can be defined as a set of institutions and practices for making collective decisions for the state
        • Government institutions would include such things as the law-making body, courts, the bureaucracy, and the military and police
        • There are a whole variety of practices of government institutions like logrolling and electioneering that will be discussed over the term
      • If Almond is right about the eight requisite functions (Danziger: 115) then there will be one or more institutions, using one or more practices, fulfilling these eight functions if the political system is to survive
    • A nation is a group of people who believe they belong together in one community, who believe they are one people (compare with Danziger: 117-18)
      • While states have a physical character (one can find the state of France on a map, and it is clearly demarcated by borders from the state of Belgium and the state of Spain) a nation is a mental phenomenon such that, for example, while most citizens of France proudly regard themselves as French, many Muslim citizens of France feel they are a nation apart (and some ordinary, non-Muslim Frenchmen feel that, indeed, French Muslims are not really French)
      • Here, again, we see the specialized use of concepts; in everyday language, people tend to carelessly speak with a mix of terms--state, nation, country (the last term is used by political scientists but without the special care that we take for state and nation)
        • Throughout this course, you should be careful to understand the concepts "state" and "nation" and to use them as they've been carefully defined
    • One of the payoffs from careful work in conceptualization is that one can sometimes recognize new phenomena, as for example when one recognizes that there may be a state (recall the definition above) which is composed to two or more nations (again, recall definition above)--what one has, then, is a multinational state
      • A classic, and tragic case, of a multinational state is the former Yugoslavia as you can see if you skip ahead (Danziger: 447-49)
      • Whether Iraq will survive as a multinational state or breaks down is of concern to many
• To expand on Danziger (126) when we say that an institution or practice is legitimate, we mean that it is regarded as right, proper, or appropriate (legitimacy of an institution or practice is carrying the attribute of being legitimate; legitimation is the process whereby some institution or practice is legitimized, comes to be recognized as right, proper, appropriate); legitimate does not equal legal (the condition of being legitimate is different from the condition of being legal) in that legitimacy is a social consensus about the rightness of some thing while the law is a state regulation of behavior (violations of which subject lawbreakers to possible punishment)
• Every political system with which I am familiar is characterized by a cleavage or multiple cleavages
  • A cleavage is a metaphorical line which divides members of the community into sides
  • Cleavage lines are founded on values (recall Danziger [123] and the Ch 1 webpage), with some members of the community holding one value while others hold another
    • In some political systems, class is the dividing line, with members of the working class at odds with members of the middle class over inequalities in wealth and the workings of the status system
      • Social class, mainly the province of sociologists is also called socioeconomic status and is typically thought of as a compound of education, occupation, and income
      • For a long time, class was the principle line of cleavage in states like Britain and Sweden
        • George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, later musicalized as My Fair Lady, was largely about the social significance of class differences
        • Data on the relationship between social class and voting choices suggest that class has become less important, but not without influence, in Britain (as is also the case in Scandanvia [Hoel & Knutsen, 1989])
    • Other political systems are characterized by other types of cleavage
      • In some political systems (Lebanon, for example, where the system is divided among Shi'a Muslims, Sunni Muslims, and Maronite Catholics) there is what is called sectarian cleavage; another example of a sectarian cleavage, where people of one faith community are, or have been, at odds with those of another faith community, is the Catholic-Protestant cleavage in Northern Ireland
      • As opposed to the sectarian kind, a different type of religious cleavage is one which pits those who are religious against those who are secular, the religious-secular kind of cleavage being one in which the issue is whether religious principles should be enacted into law; Italy, where 90% of the population is Catholic at least in name, is divided between those who prize the political contributions of the Church and those who want to keep religion and church authorities out of politics; in Israel, there is a division between religious Jews, who think the state should reflect Jewish law, and secular Israelis
      • A language cleavage is found in Belgium with Flemish-speaking Belgians in the north (aka Flanders) and the French-speakers of Wallonia in the south
      • Region is another type of cleavage, sometimes based on geographical orientations (north v south, east v west) but more often urban v rural (or, as it is also termed center v periphery); examples here might include Japan, Mexico, and Canada
      • There is also evidence in some political systems of generational cleavage where younger citizens are more committed to what are called postmaterialist values (such as free expression and environmentalism) while older citizens are more materialist (placing heavier emphasis on things like maintaining order and promoting economic growth); Germany is sometimes cited as an example
      • Conceptually distinct from "simple" language, regional, and sectarian cleavages are ethnic cleavages, situations in which the community is divided on the basis of ethnicity, where an ethnic group is defined as a group of people sharing the same culture based on geographic point of origin, language, religion, practices; Nigeria, the former Soviet Union, and the former Yugoslavia are examples of systems marked by ethnic cleavage
        • at this point, I want to strongly suggest to you that you abandon the idea of race altogether and get used to the concept of ethnicity instead; increasingly social and physical scientists are arguing that race is a meaningless concept, especially if one thinks of it in biological (blood or, to be more sophisticated, genetic) terms; being black or Hispanic or Asian or white is not a matter of biology (which the concept of race has tended to suggest) but a matter of how individuals identify themselves socially or how other identify them socially
      • Note what are not cleavage lines
        • Specific issues--such as gun control, tax policy, guest workers and immigration policy, the privileges of religious authorities, and so forth--are not the bases for cleavage, but they may well be indicative of the fundamental value conflicts which do constitute the line(s) of cleavage in a particular system
        • Political parties are the not bases of cleavage in that people do not value the Christian Democrats or the Socialists per se; rather, political parties organize to compete in elections around cleavage lines, and so voters prefer the Christian Democrats or the Socialists because of the cleavage side these parties represent
        • I would also argue in the same vein that ideology, understood as (contemporary) conservatism vs (contemporary) liberalism vs democratic socialism, etc., is not a cleavage line, but that citizens embrace one view or another because it supports the side of the cleavage (be it religion or class or region) to which they belong
  • In thinking about how political systems differ in terms of cleavage, we are interested not only in the type of cleavage, but in what might be called the cleavage structure which includes the following aspects for any political system
    • The type of cleavage, be it ethnicity, religious v secular, class, or another of those identified above;
    • The number of cleavages, whether there is a single line of conflict that divides the community or there are multiple lines of cleavage and, if multiple,
      • Whether the multiple lines overlap such that two or three lines reinforce the division of sides into the same blocs (old Yugoslavia--where Croats, Serbs, and Bosnians were divided into three warring camps by religion and region and eastern or western orientation--is an example) or are crosscutting (as, for example, in Germany where there is a class cleavage and a Catholic-Protestant cleavage but where there are working-class and middle-class Catholics and working-class and middle-class Protestants); and
    • The intensity of cleavage, one striking measure of which is the number of political deaths, as for example in Northern Ireland during the worst of "the Troubles," Rwanda, and Bosnia

Questions to consider:

• How is the United States, which is sovereign, still not autonomous?  Can you provide examples?
• Given the definition of a state, why is Chad a state but Arkansas is not?
• There is a relatively new concept that crops up occasionally to describe places like Afghanistan, Haiti, and, perhaps, Iraq--that is a failed state.  Can you imagine what might be meant by the term "failed state?"
• Having recognized the phenomenon of a multinational state, might there be something like a multistatal nation?  At the conceptual level, what would a multistatal nation be?  Can you think of any examples?  What do you know about the Kurds?  The pan-Arab movement would be another case; to complicate things further, the pan-Arab movement, based on a community of people sharing Arabic as a language and Arab culture, is different from the pan-Islam movement which some encourage to foster a community among those who share the Muslim faith but who may not be Arabic speakers and who may not culturally identify themselves as Arabs (the pan-Arab movement, on the other hand, would include non-Muslims such as Christian Arabs)
• Why are crosscutting cleavages less like to result in political violence than overlapping cleavages?
• True or false--Barak Obama is the first black US president. Explain.

Assignment: A variety of good evidence would support the argument that the US is characterized by multiple, crosscutting cleavages, specifically the simultaneously present divisions of ethnicity, religion (of the religious-secular form), and, though to a lesser extent, region (in the urban-rural form).  What evidence can you to point to that suggests that this is a reasonable conclusion and, given that, why might it be argued that having multiple, crosscutting cleavages is a good rather than bad thing?  As always, BS, GE, and recall the rules for the course, in particular those about academic responsibility.  Essays should be submitted to the Digital Drop Box by noon on Friday 2 September. (Please name your file following this convention: Cleavage Lastname Firstname--if I was doing the assignment, I'd send the file as Cleavage Levenbach David; note, at the Digital Drop Box, you need to "send," not save, the file if you want me to get it.).