Kitschelt Model - Liberty, Equality & Fraternity

We recommend that along with this section of the Culture War Encyclopedia, you see the sections on other political alignment charts that allow you to consider political stances in other ways.

In “

“Core Concept” Political Compass

” published in Journal of Social Science Education Volume 9, Number 4, 2010, pp. 45–62, Andreas Petrik writes,

The Kitschelt model and the competitive space of political thought

Herbert Kitschelt (1992; 1994; 2003) created his model as heuristics to outline the competitive space of political thought. He examined (new) party programs in post-communist as well as in western democracies and how people’s political preference formation related to them. This “political universe” can be captured by the slogans of the French Revolution: liberty, equality, fraternity. They represent three ultimate values or societal end-states and are associated with complementary, mostly conflicting modes of social organization. The concepts of liberty, equality and fraternity vary depending on the political issue they are applied to.

Kitschelt was one of the first theorists to distinguish between two cleavages that each society has to take position on: the distributive cleavage about resource allocation and the communitarian / socio-cultural one about actors, power and decision-making. This is one main reason why his heuristics is very useful for educational purposes: Whereas cleavage approaches in the tradition of Lipset and Rokkan (1967) distinguish regional divisions such as center-periphery and sometimes even more than two cleavages, such as religious-secular, economic left-right, libertarian-authoritarian and green values (see Knutsen 2009), Kitschelt’s approach provides clear linkages of value families. Since every system and political program must consider both dimensions at the same time, the form of a coordinate system seems to be the appropriate type of model:

(Kitschelt 1994, 12)

The economic or distributive axis measures possible opinions of how people should be endowed with re-sources. The left “equality”-pole is defined as the view that assets should be redistributed by a cooperative collective agency (the state, in socialist tradition or a network of communes, in the libertarian or anarchist tradition). The right “liberty”-pole is defined as the view that the economy should be left to the market system, to voluntary competing individuals and organizations. This is the classical left-right-conflict that dominated the cold war. But here we don’t deal with a bipolar system-conflict, but with opposites on a continuous dimension of alternatives within democracies.

The other axis - cross-cutting the first one - is concerned with values of fraternity, understood as axiological principles driving institutionalization, com-munity, forms and actors of democracy, and the quality of the process of collective outcomes. This dimension measures possible political opinions either in a communitarian or procedural sense, considering the appropriate amount of personal freedom and participation: “Libertarianism“ is defined as the idea that personal freedom as well as voluntary and equal participation should be maximized. This would be the full realization of liberty and equality in a democratic sense. Parts of that view are ideas like autonomous, direct democratic institutions beyond state and market, transformation of gender roles, enjoyment and self-determination over traditional and religious order. On the opposing end of the axis "authoritarianism“ is defined as the belief that authority and religious or secular traditions should be complied with. Equal participation and a free choice of personal behavior are rejected as being against human nature or against necessary hierarchies for a stable society.

Each fields of the coordinate system can be linked to one of the four political ideologies, each of them combining two ultimate values. Kitschelt introduces “anarcho-syndicalism” as a sort of left-libertarian socialism interfacing economic self-management and collective property with decentralist, non-hierarchical federalist organizations. This movement corresponds mostly with modern “post-materialist” and left-libertarian values – a fact which most other authors neglect, as we will see. “Libertarian market capitalism” combines the notion of personal liberty with unconstrained reign of market exchange. Here Kitschelt uses the American linguistic convention, to call market-liberalism “libertarian”. In the European context of political theory we talk about “liberal”, “right-liberal” and “neo-liberal” movements.

The integration of the two remaining ideologies is the weak point of his model. Since Kitschelt doesn’t clearly define democratic limits of the authoritarian pole, he equates “authoritarian socialism” with Stalin-ism. Indeed Stalinism is an extreme form of socialism; nevertheless, it is not a legitimate base for democratic parties and preferences. Instead the center of the low-er left corner of the coordinate system should be filled with the democratic socialist idea. According to this position, the great majority of non-owners (workers and employees) has the democratic right to control or to even annex big company owners. A strong government representing this majority redistributes wealth and is also necessary to lead and enlighten those who are not able to identify the structural causes of exploitation and injustice. This necessarily state-centered policy caused the historical socialist-anarchist conflict between Marx and Proudhon, later with Bakunin. In contrast to left-libertarian ideas of grassroots democracy or federation, Marx and Engels already promoted in the Manifesto of the Communist Party the authoritarian (but not dictatorial) role of the party. The second problem of Kitschelt’s model is concerned with the term “authoritarian market capital-ism”. This ideology tries to combine political authority with a free market exchange. Kitschelt (1994, 29) explains this combination mainly with “strong Christian religious affiliation” that “typically teaches compliance with established social norms”. This status quo orientation promotes a “defensive attitude” about the existing distribution of wealth. This ideology is traditionally called “conservatism”.

Kitschelt‘s coordinate system can be seen as a renewal of Karl Mannheim‘s (1936) classical model of utopian and ideological thinking published in 1929. From a perspective of Sociology of Knowledge he identified four historical ideal types of political consciousness that still influence political parties and individuals today: Orgiastic chiliasm or anarchism, liberalism, conservatism, and socialism. The anarchist idea, however, is not developed historically correctly, as it is connected to pre-Marxist German farmer’s liberation movement of the 16th century. Writing from a tendentially democratic socialist perspective, Mannheim underestimates the future role of 19th century grass-roots ideals as Proudhon and others developed them. This original error persists in many later attempts to classify historic political thinking.

Contemporary ideology research (Arzheimer 2009) gives support to the Kitschelt perspective. Two major ideology schools can be identified: First Karl Mannheim’s and Robert Lane’s sociological approach to view ideologies as deep-rooted belief systems connecting a societal diagnosis with a plea for social changes. Second the more pragmatic view in the tradition of Anthony Downs “Economic theory of democracy” (1957). His main paradigm is “rational choice” rather than identification. The cognitive costs are lowered, when relevant parties can be associated with an ideology that encompasses the interests of certain social groups. Voters don’t have to be informed about each single issue to make their choice. Instead ideologies allow referring to political “super issues” as fundamental controversial questions.

There are a couple of resembling coordinate systems which are, after all, less appropriate than Kitschelt’s version. Arzheimer, for example proposes the Kitschelt model in a less exact version. Further-more, there are four popular “political compasses” aiming at measuring individual political orientations: “The Smallest Political Quiz” (www.theadvocates.org), the “Political Compass” (http://politicalcompass.org), the “Electoral Compass” (www.electoralcompass.com) and the “Moral Matrix” (www.moral-politics.com). In the following, I will briefly summarize the typical classification problems which most of them share:

1. The “left” distributive pole is sometimes labeled as “command economy”, a term which tradition-ally refers to a non-democratic one-party system and not to a democratically organized political re-distribution of wealth.

2. The vertical axis gets sometimes de-politicized by the usage of psychological terms like “individuality” and “collectivity” without directly focusing on communitarian issues and democratic procedures.

3. Another coordinate system based on Inglehart’s value research cause confusion about the position of German parties (Raschke 1993). There, the “new” Green party within the left-libertarian field shows the largest political difference with the “old” (market-)liberals (FDP), which is only true for the distributive dimension. On the communitarian dimension, Greens and right-libertarians share the notion of civil liberties; they oppose state observation and the restriction of free speech, they are more likely to tolerate social minorities etc.

4. Mainly in US-American models, Socialism is some-times not seen as an equitable democratic orientation (as represented by European socialist and communist parties) but equated with dictatorial Stalinism. Or Socialism gets truly defined as “statist” ideology, but without labeling conservatism in an equal measure, ignoring that conservative thoughts require strong governments as well as the restricting of personal behavior that might violate traditional and religious values.

5. It is most astonishingly that National Socialism is sometimes located in the lower middle, between the socialist and conservative field of the coordinate system (Arzheimer 2009). Or, especially in the US-American compass versions, National Socialism and Socialism are regarded as rather similar or related orientations. Although, the truly conservative German historian Ernst Nolte wrote down, National Socialism is “a clearly identifiable phenomenon of conservatism” (Nolte 1984). He describes it as radicalization process of typical conservative principles like nationalism, hierarchy and obedience. More-over, National Socialism did neither expropriate big business nor did it redistribute wealth more equally. On the contrary, the National Socialists promoted a clearly stratified society and supported directly big business research and expansion interests. To treat National Socialism as a form of socialism perpetuates simply the cynicism of this label.

6. Anarchist or anarcho-syndicalist ideas are often explicitly excluded as they are seen as having developed no broad impact in most countries. This decision ignores the great indirect impact of participative and grassroots anarchist values in all western countries since “The Silent Revolution” (Ingelhart 1977) through the raise of post-materialist and left-libertarian values.

The following footnote is placed at this point in the text;

Kitschelt (and Flanagan similarily) criticizes Ingehart’s original four-item materialism/post-materialism index for merely measuring materialist values but mainly libertarian versus authoritarian values. Inglehart’s later work together with Welzel (2009) within the international team of the World Values Sur-vey is more clearly focused on emancipative (libertarian) versus traditional (authoritarian) values. Welzel states explicit correlations between their value research and Kitschelt’s results.

Back to the main text,

The last point induces me to take a short excursion on anarchist thought to eliminate the popular “bomber-image” or the prejudice of a “chaotic” society without rules and order. The first person who dealt with the four basic orientations as legitimate alternatives was prob-ably the “father of anarchism” Proudhon himself. In his late work.

‘The Principle of Federation“ (1863) he modified his earlier anti-state position and come up with a decentralized “theory of federal government“, calling it anarchy. He developed four “forms of government” based on “two fundamental and antithetical principles” that each have their own “legitimacy and morality”:

“Regime of authority

1. Government of all by one - monarchy or patriarchy;

2. Government of all by all - panarchy or communism.

The essential feature of this regime, in both its varieties, is the non-division of power.

Regime of liberty

1. Government of all by each - democracy;

2. Government of each by each - anarchy or self-government.

The essential feature of this regime, in both its varieties, is the division of power.” (Proudhon 1979, 8ff.)

At that time Proudhon opposed supporters of the liberal representative government (here referred to as democrats), Conservatives (here identified with monarchy and patriarchy) and Socialists alike. With the socialist idea he agrees on the distributive dimension since he sees capitalist and corporate property as “theft”. But the communitarian dimension separates the two egalitarian ideologies. Proudhon defines anarchy as “the government of each by himself“, which means “that political functions have been reduced to industrial functions, and that social order arises from nothing but transactions and exchanges.“ Here we find an early concept of the modern grassroots democracy. In his earlier work “Les confessions d’un révolutionnaire” (1849)

Here is placed the following footnote

Astonishingly, there is no entire English translation of this book.

The main text continues,

he already categorized anarchy as non-violent “order without leadership”:

“[...] puis mettez vous-même la main à l’oeuvre; entreprenez, agissez, et ne sollicitez ni n’attaquez le Gouvernement. C’est folie et injustice de batter les murailles de l’Autorité de votre belier démocratique et social; tour-nezle plutôt contre l’intertie des masses, contre le pré-jugé gouvernemental qui arrête tout élan populaire, et laissez tomber, par son inutilité même, le despotisme. Suscitez cette action collective, sans laquelle la condition du peuple sera éternellement malheureuse, et ses efforts impuissants. Au lieu de pourchasser le pouvoir, priezle seulement de ne se plus mêler de rien; et apprenez au peuple à faire luimême, sans le secours du pouvoir, de la richesse et de l’ordre.” (Proudhon 1849, 194)

Proudhon criticizes the “democratic and social battering ram” which the revolutionary socialist movement uses to attack the government. Instead, the people should turn the battering ram against their own phlegm deriving from their prejudiced belief in governments, a belief that restrains their vigor. Not religion but this ‘government-faith’ works as ‘opium for the people’ (Marx). That’s why Proudhon wants the people to learn collective self-initiative to create wealth and order independently of traditional and new powers which shouldn’t intervene anymore.

The probably first two-dimensional cleavage model including anarchism was developed as “rough-and-ready guide to political theory“ by the two British anarchist activists and writers Stuart Christie and Albert Meltzer in 1969 (Christie & Meltzer 1970, 104).

Combining the convincing parts of the different models and avoiding the five classification problems I mentioned, I am suggesting the following version:

(Petrik 2007, 200ff.)

Following Kitschelt, the four poles of the coordinate system refer to ultimate political values. As the terms equality and liberty are used in many different ways, the supplements “social” and “economic” seem necessary. Second, the terms “politically driven” versus “market-driven” economy should be added to make clear that the economic conflict is not only about redistribution but also about the role of the state to foster an ecological or a growth-oriented economic system. Self-determination is the logical opposite of authority in the sense of heteronomy. Self-determination can be a collective choice so the term “Individualism” isn’t appropriate. Second, the term ‘authority’ is compatible with ‘democracy’ whereas the term ‘totalitarianism’ (that some compasses use) isn’t. The concepts of self-determination and authority cover at the same time antithetical decentralized and hierarchical political systems, and opposed emancipative and traditional socio-cultural norms of everyday life.

The anarchist or left-libertarian idea represents a historical source of modern anti-authoritarian, socially just, post-materialist, feminist, multicultural, anti-militarist and ecological grassroots politics. This concept of a “strong democracy” envisions neighbor-hood assemblies, national initiatives and referendums on congressional legislation, experiments in work-place democracy, and public institutions as models for economic alternatives. In contrast to Barbers (1984, 68ff., 98ff.) misinterpretation, the basic anarchist idea based on Proudhon doesn‘t mean „anti-politics“ but instead “order without leadership”. At the same time Barbers use of the term can be understood as the un-democratic extreme of left-libertarian thought: It can become purely hedonistic, conflict-denying, generating chaos and isolation through „individual self-sufficiency“ whenever self-determination is detached from equality and collective responsibility.

Democratic socialism consists of the idea that glob-al and national deregulation as well as an increasing social inequality can only be overcome by a strong government, which would set new rules to control, reduce and occasionally expropriate big business, in order to redistribute incomes and to supply social welfare and at least a minimal income for every citizen. Enlightenment against traditional religious and other “prejudices” is seen as the central instrument to abolish injustice and exploitation. Other than in Stalinist communism, regulations are conducted by a democratic government within the legal frame of the constitution.

The liberal idea of the invisible hand is a free market system that guarantees common wealth by competition without major state invention. The truly under-stood liberalism doesn‘t distinguish between economic and personal freedom. Private life style, sexual or religious orientations should never become subject to political intervention unless it is used to harm somebody. Private property and economic growth are the major sources of social, cultural and economic development. Pushed forward to its extreme we would get a Manchester-Liberalism as pure capitalist market system without any social protection, a system automatically excluding many people from political participation.

The conservative idea is strongly rooted in Hobbes‘ view of Homo homini lupus („man is a wolf to [his fellow] man”). People need strong directives by traditional authorities to establish a peaceful, stable and well-ordered society. The government should at the same time protect individual property rights as well as control individual behavior in public and private life. Important moral values are supported and represented by religious authorities. The natural human inequality and destructive urges need a hierarchical order, in order to maintain justice and safety. National Socialism and Fascism represent an extreme form of a socially unequal, hierarchical and nationalist society.

Kitschelt (2003) mentions the linguistic convention to label the libertarian-authoritarian cleavage also left-right conflict, but he sticks to the convention to reserve the two terms to the economic dimension. I for myself consider two dimensions of left and right. Nevertheless, I will continue, for practical reasons, like Kitschelt does, to talk about left-libertarian and right-authoritarian orientations etc. Thus, these adjectives clearly distinguish both dimensions.

That’s all, at least for now.

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