How does the education cleavage stack up against the classic cleavages of the past?

This article conceptualises a political cleavage as the extent to which a group sharing a distinct social characteristic is over-represented in a political party. Using a robust measure, we find that (1) an education cleavage now structures voting for GAL and TAN parties in Western Europe; (2) these parties are far more cleavaged than contemporary centre-left and centre-right parties; (3) GAL and TAN parties are as socially structured as classically cleavaged social democratic parties in the 1950s; (4) the Republican and Democratic parties have also become strongly cleavaged on education. In neo-cleavage theory, the formation of cleavages is punctuated by periods of dealignment as prior divides lose their grip and new conflicts give rise to new political parties with distinctive social cores. There is plausible evidence that education now structures political parties in contemporary Western democracies.