A student's note

Hello and welcome to the ninth episode of Theory of the Week a weekly show from A student’s note where we explore a theory-esque concept each week.
This week I would like to introduce a macro-sociological approach to explaining voting behaviour. This means that we are discussion a theory which looks at the society, claiming that knowing about the social circumstances of different groups can help us to better understand their voting behaviour.
We are going to explore Cleavage Theory, developed by Seymour Lipset and Stein Rokkan, which is still widely used today as a framework for explaining voter behaviour and party alignment.
But let us start from the beginning.

References
Epstein, L.D. (1969) ‘Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives, by Seymour M. Lipset, Stein Rokkan’, Political Science Quarterly, 84(1), pp. 158–159. Available at: https://doi.org/10.2307/2147080.
Inglehart, R. (1977) The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics. Princeton University Press. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13x18ck (Accessed: 27 March 2026).
Kriesi, H. et al. (2008) West European Politics in the Age of Globalization. 1st edn. Cambridge University Press. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511790720.
Lipset, S.M. and Rokkan, S. (1967) Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-national Perspectives. Free Press.
Pappi, F.U. (1977) ‘Sozialstruktur, gesellschaftliche Wertorientierungen und Wahlabsicht: Ergebnisse eines Zeitvergleichs des deutschen Elektorats 1953 und 1976’, Politische Vierteljahresschrift, 18(2/3), pp. 195–229.
Schmitt-Beck, R. (2007) ‘Seymour M. Lipset/Stein Rokkan (Hrsg.), Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives, New York/London 1967’, in S. Kailitz (ed.) Schlüsselwerke der Politikwissenschaft. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, pp. 251–255. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-531-90400-9_68.



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Hello and welcome to the eighth episode of Theory of the Week, a weekly show from A Student’s Note where we explore a theory‑esque concept each week.
This week I would like to introduce another important contractualist—besides Locke and Hobbes, who we covered in the fifth episode. Today I would like to talk about Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the most influential but also controversial figures in modern political philosophy.
He was born in Geneva in 1712 and was markedly an intellectual outsider among his contemporary Enlightenment thinkers, because he was deeply sceptical of the progress and rationalism that figures like Voltaire celebrated. You may know him from the famous line “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”
Interestingly, while the diagnosis was condemned during his life, with both personal and intellectual consequences, it is the solution that became the subject of a later controversy.
But let us start from the beginning.



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Hello and welcome to the seventh episode of Theory of the Week, a weekly show from A Student’s Note where we explore a theory‑esque concept each week.
We are once again back from a break. My January and February were full of exams and papers, so we were missing a speaker for a while. But enough of that.
Today we are talking about a classic figure of modern political philosophy: John Rawls. He is mainly known for his Theory of Justice, also called justice as fairness – which some of you may have heard of. In this episode, I will first give some biographical background, then outline his theory, and finally talk about the wider impact of John Rawls.
Let us begin!


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Hello and welcome to the sixth episode of Theory of the Week. A weekly show from A Student’s Note where we explore a theory-esque concept each week.
For Christmas we took a little break, and hope you were able to do the same. In any case, we hope you had a fantastic Christmas.
This time I would like to explore social contract theory, but there are a lot of theorists who used this heuristic of natural state and society. To account for the different approaches, I chose to contrast the theories of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, two classical contractualists.
In my opinion, this comparison gives a good understanding of how different classical theorists came to surprisingly different results.
But I have already talked a lot without explaining what a social contract theory is. So let’s start from the beginning.


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Welcome to the fifth episode of Theory of a Week, a weekly show from a student’s note, where we explore a theory-esque concept each week.
This week we are entering the arena of international relations theories by exploring the social-constructivist approach. Social constructivism gives us tools to explain changes in the nature of international politics and offers a powerful critique of neorealist theories, which tend to explain change as a return to a predefined ‘natural state’ of self-help.
These tools help us give more nuanced answers when we try, for example, to make sense of NATO allies starting to doubt whether the United States would really defend them, or Germany suddenly redefining its relationship with Russia.
For this, I would like to take a slightly different approach than usual and trace the core argument from Alexander Wendt’s 1992 article ‘Anarchy is what states make of it: the social construction of power politics’ from beginning to end, instead of combining different sources and perspectives.
So this week, we really need to start from the beginning.


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