It can be argued that the more important the party in a country's politics, the greater its share of attention from scholars writing on the country's parties. Hence, we propose as a measure of the party's importance (and thus its governmental status) the number of pages on which it is mentioned as a proportion of the total number of pages in the country's microfilm information file. As with variable 1.07, this indicator is clearly different in kind from nearly all the others, for it is also not a direct measure of a party property but only an indirect indicator of the party's interest to writers, who may find the party worthy of study for reasons other than its political importance. Nevertheless, it is offered as the last variable in the series of indicators of governmental status.

Operational Definition. This variable is simply the count of the pages in our microfilm files tagged with the party's code (BV107) divided by the total number of pages in its country file. It is the value entered under "% of Pages" in Table 1.3.

Coding Results. As shown in Table 4.8, the average party was mentioned on about one-third of the pages in a country's files, which is expected because the average country has three parties. Of course, parties vary around this mean and those in single-party states claim nearly all the pages. That no party accounted for all the pages can be attributed to pages containing discussions of electoral systems, governmental structures, and other aspects of the environment without mentioning any parties.

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