ABSTRACT
The comparative study of partisan recruitment in Chapter 2 has shown how the dominant political parties in three very different political settings are a vital part of the process which converts male status in one sphere into resources in the other and how women, without status in either, cannot be the beneficiaries. Socio-economic factors are crucial, and the importance of occupational sector in explaining the patterns of male recruitment, whether it is the modified or the standard model of the resources-recruitment relationship which is at work, has been a particularly significant finding, since the measurement of socio-economic resources by education alone, or with income, has been characteristic of much previous participation research. We now have a more exact and theoretically better grounded understanding of what is going on, which has depended upon an unusually refined use of both the occupation and education variables. However, this investigation has by no means exhausted the range of recruitment contexts, even within the set of countries we have observed. As far as the Soviet Union was concerned, it is true that the total dominance of the CPSU had been the whole story of elite recruitment until very recently indeed, but in western democracies the looser institutional framework leaves room for the intervention of minor and protest parties which might be harbingers of change and for cases where non-partisan elections are the rule.
