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674 Stein Rokkan
can of course be traced within the larger countries as well, but they have notlso
heavily influenced the structuring of institutions and organizations within the
national community. One of the hypotheses we hope to substantiate in our
current study of the Smaller European Democracies79 is that the larger nations
have commanded greater resources for coping with such forces of cultural
divisiveness : the weight of the centralizing standardization machineries has
tended to be heavier and the willingness to accept and to institutionalize cultural
distinctiveness has been less pronounced than in the smaller units.
This would argue strongly for limiting comparisons of the inner structure
of smaller units to clusters of national communities grown out of the same
historical experiences of cultural conflict and integration : the polities which
emerged out of the Western Roman Empire and the clashes between secular
rulers and the Roman Catholic Church, the polities which emerged from the
Eastern Roman Empire and the Orthodox Church, the polities of the Moslem
world, the polities which grew out the partition of the Spanish and thePortuguese
Empires in the Americas, and so on. This would be tantamount to acceptance
of Galton’s point in his critique of Tylor: the smaller units should not
enter the statistical tables indiscriminately but be grouped by areas of cultural
communality. This is the third of the strategies distinguished at the beginning of
this section : the comparative analysis of dimensions of variation among polities
within one culturally-historically homogeneous region. We shall conclude
our review of styles of macro-comparison by a brief account of one such attempt
at within-region analysis.
The Lipset-Rokkan model of variations in party systemss0 is strictly limited
to the set of polities that grew out of the cultural clashes of the Renaissance
and Reformation and established their structural characteristics under the joint
impact of the Democratic Revolution in France and the Industrial Revolution
in England. The task set for the model is also strictly limited. Its purpose is
to specify, with a maximum of parsimony, the variables needed to account
for the observed variations in full suffrage party systems among the countries
initially delimited.
The purpose is not to explain the emergence of one or the other national
party system, but to identify the crucial dimensions of cross-polity variation
that account for the presence or absence of different party-political alternatives
during the elections following the introduction of universal manhood suffrage.
This is done in three steps:
- fist a set of fundamental dimensions of nation-building are identified and
the corresponding sequences of elite options are spelt out;
- secondly, a set of propositions is generated concerning the consequences of
the decisions at each option point for the formation of lasting electoral
party fronts;
- thirdly, these propositions are tested against the historically given party
alternatives and each deviant case is discussed in some detail.
The model posits four initial dimensions of nation-building and four corres-
ponding ‘critical option points’ for the national elites’ :