Why Albania Has No Stable Culture-War Cleavage: Moral Conservatism, Generational Change, and Weak Partisan Differentiation
Why have gender, family, and sexuality issues failed to become a stable axis of party competition in Albania despite recurring elite rhetoric and persistent social conservatism? This article analyses nationally representative data from the Euronews Albania Barometer (late 2023–early 2024), using a module patterned on the European Social Survey (ESS) on everyday values, moral evaluations, social distance, and family norms. Albanian society remains strongly familistic and normatively conservative regarding sexuality and heteronormative family structures, with younger and more educated groups displaying selective but limited liberalization. These value differences, however, are weakly translated into partisan competition: major party electorates differ far less on moral issues than public rhetoric suggests, and socio-demographic gradients substantially exceed partisan ones. In this post-communist context, where classical Lipset–Rokkan cleavages prove inadequate and communist legacies no longer sufficiently explain party competition, political divisions remain structured primarily by incumbency, personalized leadership, and clientelist access. Consequently, value-laden issues enter public debate through elite rhetoric or European Union (EU)-incentivized legal reforms without crystallizing into durable culture-war divisions. The article contributes to post-communist cleavage formation research by showing that widespread moral conservatism may exist without generating stable partisan cleavages.
Blendi Çeka
Blendi Çeka is a lecturer in the Department of Political Science, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Tirana, where he has taught since 2005. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Tirana with a dissertation on the relationship between electoral systems, the party system, and electoral behavior in Albania, and an MSc in European Politics and Government from the London School of Economics (LSE). His research interests include electoral systems, party systems, political behavior, and minority representation in Albania and the wider region. He serves as co-principal investigator for the Albanian National Election Study, in collaboration with the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES).