The Political Implications of Sectoral Cleavages and the Growth of State Employment: Part 2,Cleavage Structures and Political Alignment

Part 1 of this paper (last issue) outlined four alternative approaches to the analysis of non-class production cleavages, namely: empiricist electoral analysis, Weberian accounts, radical Weberian/conventional Marxist approaches, and sectoral theory. In Part 2, the sectoral approach is applied in two areas of empirical concern. The first is the analysis of the cleavage structures underlying party differentiation in modern Britain, looking in particular at union/non-union and public/private employment divisions within the labour force. The second area of application is the analysis of influences on political alignment, using two data sets for 1974. The conclusion argues for the greater accuracy and utility of sectoral theory compared with the other three approaches in both these areas, although the available empirical evidence linking sectoral location via unionization to political alignment remains essentially preliminary at this stage.