6.03	Promoting candidates through direct contact and canvassing voters
6.04	Holding public meetings and rallies for candidate exposure
6.05	Registering voters, transporting them to polls, providing baby sitters

TABLE 7.1b: EARLY 1960S: BV6.00 Open Competition in the Electoral Process

This classification is primarily heuristic. The goodness of fit between these activity variables and party strategies will be the subject of empirical determination through subsequent data analysis. In anticipation of what the analysis will reveal, we have grouped these activity variables in conjunction with the electoral strategy variable, 6.00.

Note the important conceptual distinction between variable 6.00 and variables 6.01 through 6.05. Variable 6.00 refers to the attitudinal and cognitive orientations of party activists toward achieving the goal of placing party members in government positions. Variables 6.01 through 6.05 refer to actual activities as they are performed by political parties. Because the former variable is psychological and the latter are distinctly behavioral, the scoring procedures were necessarily quite different. Variable 6.00 was scored in conjunction with variables 6.10 and 6.20 the other two strategy variables and coders had to decide on a proper mix of scores for all three variables. Variables 6.01 through 6.05, on the other hand, were scored separately from the strategy variables. This was facilitated by using different indexing codes to search the literature for information to support the scoring of a party's activities at election time.

These specific electoral activities can be conceptualized in at least two ways: (1) the proportion of the party's energies that are devoted to each type of activity or (2) the absolute frequency of occurrence. While knowledge of the proportion of party energy devoted to different types of electoral activities would have been more useful in analysis, there was no hope to support this conceptualization from the data in our library materials. Instead we had to rely on some rough measure of the frequency with which the party performed the specified activities.

Operational Definition. Our information bank could only support crude judgments about the frequency of party activities. At best, we seemed limited to coding parties on each of variables 6.01 through 6.05 according to the following trichotomy:

0	Party never or virtually never engages in the activity. Used also if literature does not specifically state that the party does not engage in the activity but discussion of the activity is conspicuous by its absence.
1	Party occasionally performs the activity but it is not considered to be a common practice of the party.
2	Party frequently performs the activity which is considered to be common practice for the party.

Coding Results. No coding results are reported for BV601 through BV605, because the number of parties that were coded on these variables was too small to warrant presentation.' After having coded approximately 20 percent of the parties in the ICPP project on all our variables, we realized that the coding was taking far longer and consuming more resources than we had anticipated. It became clear that our funding would fall far short of coding all the parties over all the variables in our design. Because of the representative nature of our sample, we decided to complete all the parties and cut down on

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