Patterns of economic and political participation; final report, pt. 2 : a conceptualization and analysis of political participation in underdeveloped countries

The purposes of the project are to develop methods by which AID can encourage political participation, in less developed countries. The report"s first section reviews the goals and scope of the project, discusses the concept of political participation, and describes steps in formulating indicators of high or low popular political participation. Various criteria for indicators are tentatively considered and the difficulties inherent in each are summarized. Finally, a system is developed which classifies countries by the extent and effectiveness of national popular political participation. The classification system produces a composite score for each country, based on the extent to which major socio-ethnic and cultural-ethnic groups are represented in the political system, the range of effective available political channels, and the extent of actual individual participation. This classification forms the basis of discriminant analyses which compare the political participation of various socio-economic subclassifications. The discriminant analyses are conducted for both 1957-1963 variables and 1963-1968 variables. Numerous data tables containing analysis results are presented and discussed. Extensive appendices present supplementary information on the political participation classification scheme.