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The Relative Salience of the Socio‐Economic and Religious Issue Dimensions: Coalition Formations in Ten Western Democracies, 1919–1979
Author(s) -
LIJPHART AREND
Publication year - 1982
Publication title -
european journal of political research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.267
H-Index - 95
eISSN - 1475-6765
pISSN - 0304-4130
DOI - 10.1111/j.1475-6765.1982.tb00018.x
Subject(s) - salience (neuroscience) , politics , dimension (graph theory) , government (linguistics) , political economy , political science , sociology , law , psychology , philosophy , linguistics , mathematics , pure mathematics , cognitive psychology
The relative importance that political parties attach to the socio‐economic and religious issue dimensions can be determined by the kinds of partners they seek in order to form government coalitions. When political parties can be classified as secular left, secular right, and religious centre parties, centre‐left and centre‐right coalitions show that the socio‐economic dimension is the dominant one, and left‐right coalitions indicate that the religious dimension predominates. Out of a total of 190 years of government coalitions that can be analysed in this way in ten countries from 1919 to 1979, the socio‐economic dimension predominated eight times as frequently as the religious dimension. The much greater salience of the socio‐economic dimension is found in all ten countries without striking variations during the entire period.