La teoría de los clivajes y el conflicto social moderno

This article was delivered as an area-paper to the Critical Political Science Meeting of Bilbao, November the 15th 2008, which was organized by the Political Science Department of the UPV (University of the Basque Country). The paper introduces an updated and synthetic version of the model designed by S.M. Lipset and S. Rokkan in 1967 in order to identify the confrontational divides distinctive of European modernization and, in this way, trace the origins of modern party systems. The expanded model proposed is applied, on the one hand, to a variety of empirical cases, prominently the postransitional Spanish case; and on the other, shows its usefulness in order to better understand the distinctive structure of the social conflict of the globalization era.