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We treat "social organizations" as institutional sectors of society, and we assume that indirect membership schemes do not involve organizations from different institutional sectors. Again as in variable 7.01, we identify the sector contributing members to the party by accompanying the variable score with an institutional code. Operational Definition. "Source of members" is coded along the following scale, which ranges from low to high autonomy.
Coding Results. It proved much easier to code "source of members" than "source of funds," and we succeeded in identifying the source of members for approximately 80 percent of the parties, as demonstrated in Tables 8.3a and 8.3b. But remember the special meaning of "source of members" in this variable. It pertains only to "direct" versus "indirect" party membership and not to the sector of society which provides the party's members, although the sector was coded when a situation of indirect membership occurred. However, the distribution of codes for BV701 show that this is a relatively rare phenomenon among political parties, despite the attention given to it by Duverger. Taking all the types of indirect membership together (codes 1 through 4), we find that only about one party in ten employs any arrangement for permitting members of social organizations to join the party indirectly. The overwhelming majority of parties which have membership requirements at all restrict membership to those who affiliate directly with the party. In view of the limited variance in this variable, it appears in retrospect that we should have conceptualized the variable so that we would have coded the social sectors which furnished the most party members. Because so few parties had any indirect members, we are not reporting the distribution
TABLE 8.3b: Early 1960s: BV7.02 Source of Members |
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