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cratic party with the Kabaka Yekka of Uganda or the Paraguayan Liberals. To the contrary, the intellectual impetus behind the ICPP project is that the enormous diversities among political parties throughout the world can be accommodated within a relatively few major concepts or dimensions of variation. Moreover, diversities within these dimensions conform to patterned relationships, specified in advance, which are expected to hold among political parties of all types and across cultural settings. When these expectations are tested, recall the heterogeneity of the sample and note that no "controls" are introduced in the analysis to enhance relationships that might be obscured by the hodgepodge (or, stated differently, representative nature of the sample). This is not to say that the relationships are unaffected by controls,[3] but it does say that much more sense than nonsense emerges from a comparison of the world's political parties in the aggregate, without differentiating them into homogeneous or "comparable" subgroups. A conceptual framework should aid understanding of complex phenomena by providing a parsimonious set of abstract concepts for subsuming an infinite variety of specific observations on human actions and social events. While parsimonious, the concepts in principle should embrace a wide range of the observable phenomena; while abstract, the concepts in practice should relate to specific empirical data. Although the ultimate value of a conceptual framework is its theoretical capacity--its contribution to construction of powerful theory which explains and predicts interesting phenomena--a preliminary and major value of a conceptual framework is its capacity for organizing and interpreting the "observables" of the world. Indeed, this function is requisite to theoretical success, for a theory cannot excel in scope and validation if its concepts do not subsume most of the empirical variation within its intended domain. The conceptual framework proposed for the comparative analysis of political parties initially sought to accommodate the observable variation among parties across nations within a set of only eleven major concepts, discussed in previous chapters. The set was later reduced to ten by subsuming two under a higher-level concept ("social aggregation" and "social articulation" were combined as "social support"). These concepts, as originally numbered and labeled as follows can be conveniently divided into those that pertain to a party's external relations with society and those that relate to its internal organization.
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