Based on data from the International Comparative Political Parties Project, this article reports an assessment of the importance of environmental factors in explaining the vertical decentralization of power within national political parties. The findings from exploratory regression analyses and, especially, from analysis-of-variance, suggest that much of the cross-national variance in party decentralization may indeed be explained by environmental factors. Special attention is paid to the system-level factors of country size, type of polity (democratic or autocratic), vertical and horizontal distributions of power within the polity, sectionalism, and social heterogeneity.
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