General Conclusion

Abstract

The purpose of this book was to shed light on the impact of cleavages on voting behaviour in Switzerland. Due to the ongoing struggle between scholars about the relevance of cleavages for today’s voting behaviour, the aim was to offer a comprehensive analytical approach examining cleavages from different perspectives. The long-term development of cleavage voting in the last decades was the focus of a first longitudinal perspective. In there, I calculated the cleavage strength over time using the lambda index (Lachat 2007a,b). The second contextual perspective, additionally motivated by the lack of contextual analyses in the field of cleavage voting, concentrated on the type of cleavage effects in more recent elections. The possible types of effects include an influence on the electoral decision through individual, contextual or joint effects. To identify the impact of the different effects, I ran multilevel models, including variables at the individual and contextual level. In order to link the two analytical perspectives, a third approach combined both longitudinal and contextual perspectives and tested if cleavage voting has become more similar across Swiss cantons. To do so, I compared the cleavage strength (again based on lambda index) between three groups of cantons over time.