In this chapter, we essentially replicate the analysis of the politicians' view of issue divides, party configurations, left-right placements, and competitive dimensions in each country for mass electorates. The key question is whether political divides and competitive dimensions are simply elite constructs “floating” on an undifferentiated mass audience, or whether they are also entrenched in the population and can be accounted for by the theoretical argument advanced in this book. In addition to this broad theme, there is a second question we pursue in the last but one section of this chapter. We explore the extent to which political divides may in fact give rise to political “cleavages” in the new post-communist democracies. According to our terminological convention introduced in chapter 2, cleavages are divides that exhibit longevity and entrenchment. If we follow Knutsen and Scarbrough (1995), a divide is more likely to constitute a cleavage if it is anchored in social-structural group differences. Political divisions that build on identifiable socio-economic or cultural groups and population sectors may be more durable than parties and divisions confined to the level of political opinion without grounding in distinct social groups.

Our cross-national analysis of programmatic alternatives and socio-structural grounding yields one result that appears inconsistent both with our theoretical framework and our empirical analysis of programmatic structuring in the political elites. In the population surveys, Bulgarian voters articulate sharper programmatic issue alternatives, configured around political parties, than the Hungarian and Polish electorates, although Bulgarian political elites engage in rather fuzzy programmatic appeals (chapters 5 through 7).