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Chapter 14: Validating the Conceptual Framework (pp. 135-161), p. 136
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TABLE 14.1: Coverage of the ICPP Project: Parties per Region and Time Period
 Region
Number of Parties
Parties Per Region
During
1950-1956
During
1957-1962
Throughout
1950-1962

Anglo-American Culture Area

22
22
22
22

West Central Europe

16
16
16
16

Scandinavia & Benelux nations

22
22
22
22

South America

18
14
18
14

Central America

17
12
12
7

Asia & Far East

16
13
14
11

Eastern Europe

10
10
10
10

Middle East & North Africa

14
12
14
12

West Africa

13
10
9
6

Central & East Africa

10
4
10
4

Total

158
135
147
124

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.

Applicability of the Framework

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.

EXTERNAL RELATIONS
1. Institutionalization
2. Governmental Status
3. Social Aggregation (renamed Social Attraction)
4. Social Articulation (renamed Social Concentration)
5. Issue Orientation
6. Goal Orientation
7. Autonomy

3. The cross-cultural applicability of the conceptual framework was assessed in Kenneth Janda, "Conceptual Equivalence and Multiple Indicators in the Cross-National Analysis of Political Parties," a paper delivered at the Workshop of Indicators of National Development, sponsored by ISSC/UNESCO/ECPR and held in Lausanne, Switzerland, 1971. In general, the paper demonstrated that insofar as conceptual inapplicability in parties research is thought to lie in using "Western" concepts for non-Western parties, this does not seem to be a problem. Based on an analysis of data for 90 parties collected to that date, the fit" of the multiple indicators within five of the seven concepts tested was actually better for the non-Western than for the Western parties.

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