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MUCH OF PARTY POLITICS centers
around political issues, and a comparative analysis of party
politics must determine the parties' positions on issues
with cross-national significance. This is far easier said
than done, for there are at least five difficult conceptual
problems that complicate the comparative study of issue
orientation. These problems deal with (1) selecting issues
for analysis, (2) formulating a consistent framework for
handling pro-con positions on issues, (3) deciding between
an "absolutist" or "relativist" basis for scoring positions
on issues, (4) distinguishing between issue consensus and
issue irrelevancy, and (5) handling discrepancies
between party program and party practice. Each of these
problems will be discussed in turn before discussing the
conceptual basis and presenting the operational definitions
prepared for the basic variables in this variable
cluster.
1. Selecting issues for
analysis. We begin by conceiving of a hypothetical
universe of all issues confronting political parties
during our time period, 1950-1962. Limiting our
attention to issues during this time period in itself
imposes constraints on comparative analysis, for another
time period might well produce a different universe of
issues. We further narrow the universe by also requiring
that the issues be pervasive enough to elicit conflicting
positions by parties in more than two
countries--insisting, in fact, that the issues must
either cut across countries in different
cultural-geographical areas or that they be common to
most of the party systems within a single area. Even thus
delimited, the universe of issues is ill defined and
probably still far larger than the set of thirteen that
we identified for inclusion in the analysis. The issues
that we selected constitute a "sample" of the universe
only to the extent that we have not included all the
issues that might be included in a cross-national
analysis. We hope that we have selected the important
ones, but we certainly have not exhausted the universe of
possibilities.
2. Formulating a consistent
pro-con scoring framework. Issue-oriented politics
are commonly discussed in terms of pro and con
positions; one party is for a certain government
policy and another is against it. This kind of dualism
lends itself to scoring parties either positively or
negatively on the policy or issue and expressing the
magnitude of their support or opposition in terms of the
value accompanying the sign. Such a scoring system
facilitates analysis by incorporating into the data the
pro-con distinctions of conventional political discourse.
Without question, the most common yardstick for
evaluating parties during our period was the "left-right"
distinction, which permeated the party politics
literature. For example, the World Survey of Communist
Party Strength, prepared and published annually by
the U.S. State Department Intelligence and Research
Bureau, rates parties in each country along a left-right
continuum (actually the extreme categories are
"communist" and "conservative") providing us with a
convenient "macro" evaluation of party ideology by
country experts.
An important task for the comparative
analysis of political parties is to investigate the
universality and unidimensionality of such presumed
continuums. To help this analysis, we attach left-right
interpretations to the parties' positions on the issues at
the time of scoring, adopting the convention that a positive
score is associated with a "leftist" position. Clearly,
attributing left- right positions to parties is easier on
some issues than it is on others, but, despite the imperfect
fit for certain issues, the decision of which side should be
treated as "left" and which side as "right" proved to be
workable in coding. The extent of the appropriateness of
this procedure, and the extent of the unidimensionality of
the distinction, will emerge from subsequent analysis of the
data.
3. Deciding between
"relative" and "absolute" scoring. It is possible
that a "leftist" position on an issue in one country
might constitute a "rightist" position in another
country, which indicates that "left" and "right" can be
regarded in relative terms, depending on national party
politics. While such a relativistic approach to scoring
parties on issue orientation may be faithful to politics
within countries, it frustrates crossnational analysis of
party orientations due to the lack of a common referent
across countries. Therefore, we have opted for an
"absolutist" approach to scoring issue orientation, which
involves formulating common scales for
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