peared, no existing parties terminated. Parties in North Africa and the Middle East suffered fates similar to the parties in Central America. Almost half ended by 1978 and most were terminated involuntarily. The highest party mortality rate by far occurred in Africa south of the Sahara, where nearly one-third of the parties failed before 1979. Moreover, involuntary causes of suppression and dissolution upon governmental overthrow accounted for most of the failures.

We can use the information gained from examining the reasons for party failure to explain the rise of new parties by regions, given in Table 15.4. Indeed, regions do appear to vary in their hospitality toward the creation of new parties in the sense of allowing freedom to organize, even in opposition to the government. But in some areas, the freedom to organize does not extend to freedom to continue, which seems to be true in Central America, Asia, and Africa. In these regions, many parties are formed, but they do not last. The situation is different in Western Europe, where many parties arose after 1962 but nearly all continued. But note that the situation in Eastern Europe and in the "Western" regions is not materially different in surface manifestations. In both regions, few parties originally and virtually all continued once formed.

This discussion leads to questions about party life and death. How long is the average life of a political party? What is the relationship, if any, between party age and cause of death? Table 15.9 addresses the first question dealing with party life-span. For the continuing parties, which constitute two-thirds of the 208 parties under study, we can cite only their age as of 1979. More than two-thirds of the continuing parties were 25 years old or older. This fact contrasts sharply to the distribution of the terminated parties by age at death. Fully three quarters of these parties were younger than 25, and more than half were less than 15 years old. Obviously, there is some analogy to infant mortality in the case of parties as well as humans. Once parties are allowed to mature, their chances of survival increase dramatically.

The relationship between party age and party fate is shown in Table 15.10. While about half of the parties under 5 years of age remained alive in early 1979, this group has not yet lived long enough to have much chance to die. For parties between 5 and 15 years of age, more than 60 percent died before 1979. If a party survives until age 15, its chances of continuing nearly double. However, there is a rise in mortality among parties between 19 and 25, which may be due only to chance factors and the relatively small numbers of parties in

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