ICPP Project -- 2000 Initiative*

The 2000 Initiative invites scholars and political observers to update data on the existing parties in the ICPP project via the World Wide Web.

The International Comparative Political Parties Project is described in Kenneth Janda, Political Parties: A Cross-National Survey (New York: The Free Press, 1980). According to the publisher's book jacket: This is the first systematic, comprehensive, empirically-based study of political parties around the world. The result of more than fifteen years' work, this encyclopedic volume is a unique handbook for the comparative analysis of party politics and a rich source of information on political parties. It looks at 158 political parties operating in 53 countries from 1950 to 1962, with a further tracing of these parties' histories through 1978. Fifty countries were randomly selected for detailed study--five from each of ten cultural-geographic regions--to provide a representative sample of party systems. Three other countries--the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada--were included for substantive interest. The countries represent all regions, political cultures, and types of party systems in the world.   Press the buttons below for more information about the ICPP Project and the 2000 Initiative

These buttons are currently inoperative.

In the summer of 2003, I plan to present a paper at the World Congress of the International Political Science Association in Durban, South Africa, on a method for collecting structured data on theoretically important variables on political parties from scholars across the world via the internet. "Expert judges" would fill out web-based forms, customized for each variable, rating specific parties for which they have knowledge. Their ratings are entered over the internet into a complex database entailing separate files for each variable and party. Participating scholars, who will be asked to score only those variables for which they have knowledge, are also required to describe their expertise. Information about contributing scholars will be used for data quality control. The distribution of expert ratings on a given variable for each party is evaluated prior to assigning the composite score that is recorded in the file of collected data released for statistical analysis. Contributing scholars will have first access to the assembled data; then the data will be released over the internet to the scholarly community. The two buttons to the right will be functional sometime after the World Congress, June 29-July 4, 2003.

*A "Summer Camp" at Northwestern University was organized in 2000 to engage undergraduate students in political party research. Supported with university funds, nine students worked intensively over eight weeks. Their work laid the basis for the ICPP 2000 Initiative, an ongoing effort to update the data in the ICPP Project through contributions via the Internet from scholars across the world.