In addition to resting on repression and institutional closure, opportunities for socialist political control depended on the development of electoral-politico-parliamentary blocs capable of enforcing the political domestication of the socialist movement. Many studies stress the importance of early alliances among major economic and social groups, assuming that the nature of the political regime developed from the logic of the subtending socioeconomic coalitions. Instead, I place more emphasis on the logic that political coalition results from specific forms of political representation developed by the main social groups during the phase of the party-system structuring. In this view, large social groups do not make coalitions or form alliances unless they are able to develop forms of political self representation.

This chapter examines the class cleavage in the light of the process of structuring of the national party systems or, more precisely, structuring stable sets of coalitions and alliances among social groups and political organizations. Within each national context, I discuss the following:

1. Which other social movement, if any, preceded or accompanied the socialist movement and what its political nature was (antiestablishment, nationalist, popular self-representational, or merely institutional, such as the opposition of the Catholic clergy).

2. What cleavage issues were already politicized when the labor movement entered the electoral race; what kinds of political parties, if any, were already active in electoral and partisan recruitment; what political alignments and national coalitions were already established among the forerunners and to what extent these reduced the range of options open to the socialists.

3. […]