AP Comparative Government and Politics Flashcards: Political And Social Cleavages
Study Political And Social Cleavages in AP Comparative Government and Politics with focused flashcards that help you recognize the idea, recall the key rule, and apply it in practice-style prompts.
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QUESTION
How can cleavages lead to political conflict?
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ANSWER
By creating opposing groups with conflicting interests. Competing interests between groups can escalate into political confrontation.
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AP Comparative Government and Politics: Political Culture and Participation
This deck focuses on Political And Social Cleavages, giving you a quick way to review the definitions, rules, and examples that matter most for AP Comparative Government and Politics.
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Work through these flashcards in short sessions. Try to answer each prompt before flipping the card, then revisit any cards you miss until the explanation feels automatic.
Read the passage: Scenario—Economic Cleavages. In the United States and Brazil, class-based economic cleavages structure political conflict through unequal income, wealth concentration, and uneven access to education and healthcare. In the United States, scholars describe a long-term partisan sorting in which higher-income and higher-education voters increasingly align with one party while many working-class voters, including non-college voters, consolidate around the other, though patterns vary by region and race. Campaign finance rules and interest-group lobbying are widely studied as channels through which affluent actors influence agenda-setting, while union density declines relative to mid-twentieth-century levels. In Brazil, high inequality and a large informal sector shape participation and representation; parties often rely on personalistic coalitions, and legislators operate in a fragmented multiparty system that encourages bargaining over budgetary resources. Social programs—especially conditional cash transfers and expansions in social assistance—become salient symbols of redistribution and can mobilize lower-income voters, while fiscal constraints and coalition management condition policy continuity. Across both countries, economic cleavages affect political culture by fostering divergent beliefs about the state's role in welfare provision, taxation, and regulation; they also influence participation through turnout gaps, differential donor influence, and protest politics. These cleavages can complicate policy-making: redistributive proposals face polarization in the United States and coalition trade-offs in Brazil, with implications for governance and stability when institutions struggle to translate social demands into durable policy. References: Lipset, S. M., & Rokkan, S. (1967). Party systems and voter alignments. In S. M. Lipset & S. Rokkan (Eds.), Party systems and voter alignments. Free Press; Mainwaring, S. (1999). Rethinking party systems in the third wave of democratization. Stanford University Press; Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the twenty-first century. Harvard University Press. Based on the text, how do economic cleavages influence voting behavior in Brazil?