SUMMARY AND REVIEW OF THE COUNTRY FINDINGS

Coding

With the exception of Chapters 3 and 9 where we presented parallel but separate analyses of four ‘Anglo-Saxon’ democracies and two Scandinavian systems, each chapter has explored the dimensions and cleavages of party competition, within one country, independently, and in detail. Within the common coding frame of Appendix B, country investigators were free to introduce additional sub-categories to capture the idiosyncracies of their ‘own’ system. It is significant that many did not feel this need, or introduced no more than a few refinements and additions. It is also significant that most country-specific categories introduced at the outset of the coding, on the a priori assumption that they were necessary to accommodate idiosyncracies of the countries involved, were found to collect few references and had to be collapsed back into the general categories.

All this demonstrates that the general coding frame accommodated the major issues of party politics in a very diverse set of countries. It worked least well where it was least relevant, in the basically rural if developing society of Sri Lanka. This was not unexpected, but even here the results made broad sense.

In retrospect, other general coding categories might have been added. This is perhaps more obvious in the External Relations categories than elsewhere, as no direct reference is made to East–West relations nor to the leading alliances such as NATO (though references to foreign special relationships and military pick this up).