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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (pp. xv-xviii) this is p. xvi |
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for twenty additional countries. These were drawn in groups of five from North Africa and the Middle East, South America, Central America, and the Anglo-American culture area. In recognition of the enormity of the task of studying all 90 countries as originally planned, my request for a renewal of NSF support scaled down the project to a sample of 50 countries, 5 from each of our 10 cultural-geographical areas. Northwestern's Council for Intersocietal Studies, under the direction of Richard Schwartz, supported my research on the project for a time until NSF renewed its support for one year with Grant GS-2533. In the summer of 1969, 20 countries in Scandinavia, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and Asia were processed to complete the creation of our information base on 50 countries. Thus, the first three years of the project were devoted solely to developing the information base to support the coding of parties on the variables in the conceptual framework. The framework itself was a product of the indexing operation. The literature disclosed tremendous variations among political parties and stimulated the creation of alternative indicators of the major dimensions of variation among parties across the world. The conceptual framework was not finalized until the summer of 1969 when it was prepared for a paper delivered at that year's convention of the American Political Science Association.[2] Gilbert Rotkin and Donald Sylvan collaborated with me on the preparation of the conceptual framework, and we were assisted by John Thomas, Robert Drummond, Eve Harris, and Raymond Corrado. The information base that was created to support our coding involved more than 60,000 pages from over 3,000 documents. The substantial bibliographic effort required to identify and locate relevant citations was professionally supervised by Ann Janda. Apart from bibliography searching, it was a considerable technical task to obtain this material from libraries at Northwestern and elsewhere, to keypunch hundreds of thousands of indexing codes, to record the material on microfilm, and to splice the film segments into almost 100 cartridges. Through almost all of this activity, Carolyn Billingsley Smith kept things running smoothly as the project's superb administrative assistant. The technical staff, which she supervised during these three years, included Frederick Barber, Sandra Brown, Marilou Carrillo, Raymond Corrado, Barbara Fritze, Harriet Goss, Richard Greenfield, Leanne Hoole, Nan Hunter, Laurine Kreer, Aileen Lum, Kevin Sherman, Lawrence Simms, Kathy Schwering, Kathy Vonesh, and Dana Whalen. Coding the parties with the use of our microfilm information base began in earnest in the fall of 1969. With the belief that they could be coded during the year and that the data would be available for analysis the following fall, I obtained support from the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia for a leave of absence in 1970-1971 to analyze the data. Unfortunately, the coding took far longer than anticipated and only 73 parties were completed at the beginning of my leave at FPRI. But I obtained a small continuation grant from NSF (GS-27081) that supported a staff at Northwestern to complete the coding under the capable supervision of Mary Welfing. An additional 17 parties were completed during 1970-1971 and sent to me at FPRI and the University of Essex, which had been kind enough to accord me office space and computer time as a Visiting Scholar of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Most of my time at both FPRI and Essex was spent in data cleaning instead of data analysis. Upon my return to Northwestern, 64 parties remained to be completed, and my NSF funds were exhausted. Apart from one quarter's support for myself from the American Enterprise Institute, no outside funds have been available to complete the coding on the remaining parties, and I have had to rely almost entirely on volunteer efforts from numerous students, most notably Doreen Kostel Ellis, Alan Kaplan, David Mallof, Paul Rossa, Paul Scott, Patricia Sweeney, and Michael Ward but also Robert Harmel and Robin Gillies. Without their help, the coding would still be incomplete. The information in this book is largely the product of those who indexed the literature and coded the parties. They deserve to be cited explicitly for their contributions by the countries of their concern: Joan Amerling: Australia, 02 |
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