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

676 Stein Rokkan
to bring about a reversal in the strategies of comparison. Instead of proceeding
as though socio-cultural distinctions determined political behaviour through
some process of direct translation, the new emphasis is on the parties as agen-
cies of mass mobilization and on the socio-cultural divisions within the elect-
orates as so many openings for or barriers against efforts of mobilization. In
this model the null hypothesis would be that each party succeeds equally well
in all divisions of the electorate: the structure of departures from these average
mobilization successes would then define the given party system. This implies a
fundamental change in the direction of analysis. Instead of seeking to establish
more and more multivariate regularities in the determination of micro-be-
haviours, we resolutely start out with the parties and use the micro-data to
characterize the macro-alternatives in each system. This strategy was elucidated
in some detail at a recent conference organized by the Committee on Political
Sociology of the International Sociological Association. Richard Rose and
Derek Urwin presented a plan for the use of data from sample surveys from
12-15 countries in a comparative analysis of the cohesion and distinctiveness
of party electorates:s3 they did not want to use micro-data to test propositions
at the level of individual voters, but to generate typologies of macro-alternatives
as a step in the formulation and testing of higher-order hypotheses.
Such shuttling between different levels of comparative analysis is likely to
become common in most fields of social science inquiry. It is of course no acci-
dent that the examples of such procedures so far given have come from compa-
rative politics. Anyone concerned with nations as units of analysis must of
necessity consider dimensions of political decision-making - not only because
nations defme areas of homogeneous practices in data gathering and data
evaluation, but also because so much of what happens and is registered within
a nation reflects conflicts and compromises among political elites and within
the populations they have been able to mobilize. In this sense, all cross-national
comparisons confront the social scientist with tasks of political analysis: no
body of social science data, even purely demographic or linguistic, can be
compared without some consideration of the political contexts in which they
were generated.
IV. THE ORGANIZATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE
We have reviewed a great variety of cross-cultural and cross-national studies
and tried to account for the principal differences in methodological style and
theoretical orientation. We have touched upon questions of research organiza-
tion only incidentally. In this final section we shall endeavour to spell out in
some detail what is known about the organizational basis for the internation-
alization of the social sciences and shall focus particular attention on the
functions of UNESCO and its satellite bodies in the advancement of comparative
social science research.
The current generation of social scientists has, at least in the nations of the
West, been caught in the cross-fire of two conflicting sets of demands: on one