Fragmented Solidarities and Political Leadership: Social Cleavages and Democratic Representation in Changing Societies

Political leadership is increasingly shaped by fragmented and overlapping social solidarities. In democracies around the world, established bases of collective identification centred on class, caste, ethnicity, religion, race or region intersect with new cleavages in socioeconomic status, mobility and identity, alongside changing dynamics of political polarisation. These transformations raise key questions for political sociology: How do new generations of political leaders emerge amid changing social structures? How do leaders create and negotiate heterogeneous constituencies? And how do changing patterns of solidarity reshape democratic representation and political power?
The emergence of new cleavages within Western societies, alongside changing forms of political leadership globally, raises important questions about their interaction and political consequences. This panel starts from the premise that political leadership is neither purely a product of institutions nor simply an exercise of elite agency. Rather, leaders emerge through the interplay of social structures, political resources, collective identities and institutional opportunities. While social groups provide bases of political support, leaders can also reshape solidarities by reframing, weakening or recombining existing forms of collective identification in response to changing political conditions.
The panel examines how these processes shape leadership formation, candidate selection, political mobilisation and democratic representation across social hierarchies, including class inequalities, caste and ethnic divisions, religious identities, gender, regional affiliations, migration and economic transformation. It asks whether the weakening of traditional class-based or community solidarities necessarily produces greater individualisation or instead generates new, more fragmented forms of political collective action across the Global North and Global South.
We welcome contributions from diverse political contexts, using comparative, historical, quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-methods approaches. Papers may examine political parties, elections and constituencies, social movements, political elites and leadership networks, or changing forms of political participation.
The panel aims to advance political sociology by bringing together research on inequality, identity, leadership and representation. It seeks to understand how political leadership is being reconfigured as established social boundaries become simultaneously more fluid and politically salient, and how these transformations affect the capacity of democratic systems to produce meaningful representation and sustain political legitimacy.