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exhibit peculiarities of uneven development or cultural dissonance characteristic of much younger polities. The extreme nationalist position on this issue is clearly advocacy of the obliteration of subnational loyalties, whether regional, ethnic, linguistic, traditional, or some combination of these. The Kemalist revolution led by the Turkish People's Party in the 1920s is representative of such a program in its attempts at Turkification of ethnic minorities and revitalization of the Turkish nation through political, legal, and educational reform. (Note that the secularizing aspects of the movement are coded elsewhere; see variable 5.05.) Parties which take a position short of this extreme may institutionalize state predominance by preempting control over major administrative structures and yet, at the same time, tolerate minor functional expressions of regional or communal authority. Such toleration, however, is likely to be accompanied by oratory along the lines of Sekou Touré's plea to the (Guinean people to forsake tribalism and thereby facilitate national advancement. A weaker stance on this issue is represented by a policy that promotes the dominance of national structures while accommodating subnational units by means of such devices as the reservation of seats in the national legislature for sole occupation by members of particular ethnic or territorial groups. Support for an effective federal structure characterized by the virtual sharing of decision-making authority between national and subnational power centers is designated to be slightly rightist in the light of the contemporary ethos of centralism. What may be labeled a confederal posture--sacrifice of some subnational authority to a central government but reservation of control over tax collection, education, law enforcement, and the like--constitutes an intermediate rightist stance. The extreme disintegrative position on this issue is the assertion of subnational autonomy--that is, separatism. Operational Definition. Parties are coded according to the degree to which they favor or oppose national predominance, which are the pro and con positions on this issue, respectively.
Coding Results. About 80 percent or more of our parties were receptive to coding on "national integration." There is little difference between the means in Tables 6.12a and 6.12b for BV510 for the first and last halves of the decade, with the center of gravity being somewhat on the side of nationalism in both. Although the means for AC510 tend toward the low side compared with other variables in the issue orientation cluster, there is no significant correlation between BV510 and AC510. The spread of democratic ideals across time and across space has produced demands for participation in governments from newly politicized segments of societies. In many cases, these pressures for greater political participation stimulated the creation of political parties to represent these emerging forces in politics. In other cases, existing parties competed for the new participants, seeking to facilitate their entry into the political arena. In still other cases, established governmental parties grappled with the problem of how to resist the demand for meaningful participation while claiming the practice of democracy for the benefit of the international community. The abstract issue of popular participation in government can be translated into the concrete issues of the extent and nature of participation in elections to choose governmental leaders. A party's response to the extent of electoral participation relates to its position on extension of the franchise, which depends not only on its commitment to political |
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