Pillarization

Characteristics and Political Relevance

The term pillar (verzuiling in Dutch and Flemish and Lager in German) is sociologically defined as strong political-cultural submilieus based on ethnic-linguistic, religious, or similar cleavages with a strong internal organization and a relatively high level of external autonomy. Under such circumstances, you can spend much of your life within the networks of such pillars, often including schools, media, political parties, and so on. These organized submilieus are politically relevant for understanding the stability and survival of democracy in (deeply) divided societies. Lijphart mentions five criteria to measure the degree of pillarization:

• 1.
  the role of ideology (more often than not cleavage related) within the pillar,
• 2.
  the size and density of the organized network representing the pillar,
• 3.
  the (institutionalized) cohesiveness of the pillar's network,
• 4.
  the extent of “enclosure” of the pillar (or the absence of cross-cultural relations), and
• 5.
  the extent to which pillarized behavior is encouraged and directed by its elites.

The application of these criteria to West European democracies shows that there are four polities that indeed qualify as being pillarized: Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. The last is seen as the least pillarized. Others, for example, Gerhard Lehmbruch, have claimed that the Federal Republic of Germany belongs to the pillarized community, too. This is questionable because Lehmbruch focused on the organization of the German postwar party system and its ramifications for decision making at the federal level. His explanation rested more [Page 1861]on the cleavage-related mechanisms and the complexities of organizing representation in a federation. Hence, the working of the German polity showed some of the features of a pillarized system.

Switzerland can also be considered as a borderline case. Rather than being the well-organized and cohesive pillars (as defined here), the extant cleavages in Swiss politics—religious/secular, language-cum-territory divisions, and the rural/urban divide—accounted for the development of consociational practices through the mechanisms of the party system dynamics. For example, Pascal Sciarini and Simon Hug claim that pillarization in Switzerland is weak because it only plays a role in finding amicable agreement based on cleavages and by means of proportionality on the federal level. Pillarized networks are not the main agents but rather national political parties that are in turn checked and balanced by institutional safeguards through cantonal representation and the referendum instrument.

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