|
TABLE 15.10: Percentage Distribution of
All Parties by Age and Fate
|
|
Party Age1
|
|
% of Parties
|
Percent of Parties
Terminated
|
Total
|
|
(years)
|
N
|
Continuing
|
Voluntarily
|
Involuntarily
|
%
|
|
1-4
|
13
|
54
|
23
|
23
|
100
|
|
5-9
|
23
|
39
|
22
|
29
|
100
|
|
10-14
|
23
|
39
|
30
|
30
|
100
|
|
15-19
|
20
|
65
|
10
|
25
|
100
|
|
20-24
|
19
|
47
|
10
|
42
|
100
|
|
25-40
|
56
|
80
|
9
|
10
|
100
|
|
50-74
|
28
|
86
|
11
|
4
|
100
|
|
75-99
|
14
|
86
|
14
|
|
100
|
|
100-
|
12
|
100
|
|
|
100
|
|
1 In 1979 or at termination.
|
each age grouping. After parties reach 25, the
probability of continuing jumps to 80 percent. When they
terminate, moreover, parties more than 25 years old tend to
end for voluntary rather than involuntary reasons. The only
instance of a party older than 50 years ending involuntarily
was the Cuban Liberal Party, which was terminated after the
1959 revolution. It is clear that party longevity, unlike
human longevity, is associated with increased likelihood of
continued survival. Of course, parties that endure for long
periods of time enjoy more opportunities to fashion a
comfortable environment to sustain them in their golden
years.
One environmental factor directly related to party
continuity is stability in number of parties in the system.
Political science folklore holds that two-party systems are
more stable than multiparty systems and that single-party
systems supposedly have the greatest capacity for abrupt
change. When viewed across all nations, the numbers of
parties per system (reported in Table 15.11) show a slight
trend since 1950 away from systems with two to four parties
and toward the extremes of more than five and less than two
parties. This observation may mask more information than it
conveys, however, for one really wants to know which
countries have experienced different party systems over
time.
There are various ways of measuring party system
instability (see Pederson 1980). For the purpose of this
chapter, we employed a very simple measure, which differs
from our measures of party instability in Chapter 3 (see BV
105 and BV 106). The percentage of seats held by a party in
one year was subtracted from the percentage held in the next
year. The absolute values of these differences for each pair
of adjacent years from 1950 through 1978 were then summed
over all 28 pairs to give a measure of aggregate change for
each party. A party that held exactly the same percentage of
seats in every year throughout the time period would show no
changes and would receive a summed score of 0. Parties that
fluctuated widely. in legislative representation would
receive scores upward of 0, depending on the degree of
fluctuation. These individual party scores can be aggregated
into party system scores by summing the party scores across
all the parties in the country. Dividing the result by 28
(the number of year-pairs involved in the calculation)
yields a measure of the average percentage change in the
distribution of party seats from
|
TABLE 15.11
|
Classification of All 53 Countries by
Number of Parties per System during
Four Time Periods
|
|
No of Parties per System
|
1950-1956
|
1957-1962
|
1963-1970
|
1971-1978
|
|
None active
|
2
|
-
|
-
|
1
|
|
One
|
11
|
9
|
14
|
15
|
|
Two
|
13
|
13
|
11
|
10
|
|
Three
|
11
|
12
|
9
|
8
|
|
Four
|
10
|
8
|
8
|
7
|
|
Five
|
5
|
8
|
6
|
5
|
|
Six
|
-
|
1
|
1
|
3
|
|
Seven
|
1
|
1
|
2
|
1
|
|
Eight
|
-
|
-
|
-
|
2
|
|
Nine
|
-
|
-
|
1
|
-
|
|
Total
|
53
|
53
|
52a
|
52a
|
|
aThe Federation of Rhodesia and
Nyasaland terminated in 1963, so the sample size
decreased by one for the last two time
periods.
|
|