Suchergebnisse

The field of the comparative study of political party systems has been particularly fortunate to have been the focus of quite a number of substantial scholarly team efforts in recent years. Individual case studies are still appearing that follow Robert A. Dahl's model of the "patterns of opposition." Terms such as "crisis of participation" or Sartori's "extreme pluralism," from the book edited by Joseph La Palombara and Myron Weiner,2 are widely used in the description of party systems. Even the study of one-party systems and of national integration in developing areas is beginning to settle down to a common terminology that will increasingly allow comparison with the better-explored systems.

An attempt is made to test the hyp that the more homogeneous the SE bases of pol'al parties, the weaker the r between soc participation & SL. 3 countries are compared: the US, Great Britain, & West Germany. Though it was not found to be possible to order the latter 2 nations re the degree of association between SL & degree of participation, the hyp seems supportable if the US is compared with Great Britain on the one hand, & West Germany on the other. IPSA Tr by A. Potter.

Arguments are presented for and against a series of hypotheses about the influence of the parliamentary party system on the stability of governments, and the hypotheses are tested against data on 196 governments in parliamentary democracies since 1945. A strong relation is found between the duration of governments and the fragmentation of the parliamentary party system and of the government parties, but the fragmentation of the opposition parties seems not to affect stability. One-party governments are more stable than coalition governments, and majority governments more than minority governments. The ideological dispersion of the parties—in the whole parliament, in the government, or in the opposition—does not explain stability any better than fragmentation, which is based upon only the number and sizes of parties; but the proportion of seats held by 'anti-system' parties (communists and neo-fascists, mainly) is a good indicator of stability. The best explanation of government stability found here is the combined linear influence of the size of the anti-system parties and the fragmentation of the pro-system parties.

This paper sets out to consider two related questions: the significance of elections in single-party systems in underdeveloped countries, and the kind of study which political scientists have made of such elections.1