Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

Cross-cultural, cross-societal and cross-national research 675
Cultural dimensions: Corresponding option points:
I. Centre - periphery One standardized national language or several ?
11. State - Church Establishment of national Church
vs. alliance with a supranational Church
vs. establishment of competing secular agencies
Economic dimensions:
III. Urban - rural
Protection of urban vs. rural products against
foreign competition: the tariff issue.
IV. Owner - worker Protection of rights of property vs. equalization
of economic conditions through union and/or
state action.
This listing of dimensions and options could of course be used in studies of any
nation-state, whether European, American, Asian or African, but this would
not of itself make for theoretically fruitful comparisons: just as in the case of
the Almond-Pye paradigm the initially posited dimensions of variability must
be linked up with each other and with an explicitly stated set of dependent
variables in a series of potentially testable propositions. Thus far we have been
able to formulate such a set of propositions for one set of dependent variables
for sixteen countries of Western Europe. Qther scholars are at work on similar
exercises in model-building for Latin America, but this work has not yet ad-
vanced far enough to yield definite results.*' One very good reason is that the
range of dependent variables in the model is much broader and the variables
themselves are not as easy to operationalize.
These attempts at codification and empirical testing not only promise further
advances in the comparative study of nation-building processes, but are bound to
have an impact on further work with data at the micro-level of each political
system. In fact, we were directly motivated to develop our model for the
explanation of the European party systems by the difficulties encountered in
attempts to interpret cross-national data on mass reactions to politics in
different countries of the West. Seymour Martin Lipset and his colleague
Juan Linz had made a major effort in the mid-fifties to collate data from many
countries on the political preferences of a variety of occupations and profes-
sions, but found it extremely difficult to compare information at this level be-
cause of the variations in the political alternatives offered the voters in the
different countries.82 The Lipset-Rokkan model represented a response to the
challenge of this earlier effort: it served to specify the dimensions of the de-
pendent variables in comparative studies of voting behaviour, and made it
possible to group countries by the extent of similarity of alternatives and to
order parties by their degree of national distinctivencss. What makes this opera-
tion so intriguing is that it has opened up a new perspective on the interaction
of micro- and macro-variations in political systems. By focusing with such de-
termination on the macro-level, the Party Systems volume has in fact helped