Kenneth Benoit

The London School of Economics and Political Science | LSE · Department of Methodology

Manual annotation of the policy content of political texts forms the basis for one of the most widely used empirical measures in comparative politics: left-right policy positions. Bridging automated “text as data” approaches and qualitative content analysis, we apply statistical scaling to this data to learn more about the association of specific p...

Cambridge Core - American Studies - Can America Govern Itself? - edited by Frances E. Lee

Political scientists lack domain‐specific measures for the purpose of measuring the sophistication of political communication. We systematically review the shortcomings of existing approaches, before developing a new and better method along with software tools to apply it. We use crowdsourcing to perform thousands of pairwise comparisons of text sn...

quanteda is an R package providing a comprehensive workflow and toolkit for natural language processing tasks such as corpus management, tokenization, analysis, and visualization. It has extensive functions for applying dictionary analysis, exploring texts using keywords-in-context, computing document and feature similarities, and discovering multi...

Probabilistic methods for classifying text form a rich tradition in machine learning and natural language processing. For many important problems, however, class prediction is uninteresting because the class is known, and instead the focus shifts to estimating latent quantities related to the text, such as affect or ideology. We focus on one such p...

Computational text analysis has become an exciting research field with many applications in communication research. It can be a difficult method to apply, however, because it requires knowledge of various techniques, and the software required to perform most of these techniques is not readily available in common statistical software packages. In th...

Well-established methods exist for measuring party positions, but reliable means for estimating intra-party preferences remain underdeveloped. While most efforts focus on estimating the ideal points of individual legislators based on inductive scaling of roll call votes, this data suffers from two problems: selection bias due to unrecorded votes an...

Economic crisis and the resulting need for austerity budgets have divided many governing parties and coalitions in Europe, despite strong party discipline in the legislative voting on these harsh budgets. We measure these divisions using automated text analysis methods to scale the positions that legislators express in budget debates, in an effort...

Empirical social science often relies on data that are not observed in the field, but are transformed into quantitative variables by expert researchers who analyze and interpret qualitative raw sources. While generally considered the most valid way to produce data, this expert-driven process is inherently difficult to replicate or to assess on grou...

Despite the huge number of possible seat distributions following a general election in a multiparty parliamentary democracy, there are far fewer classes of seat distribution sharing important strategic features. We define an exclusive and exhaustive partition of the universe of theoretically possible n-party systems into five basic classes, the und...

Well-established methods exist for measuring party positions, but reliable means for esti- mating intra-party preferences remain underdeveloped. Most efforts focus on estimating the ideal points of individual legislators based on inductive scaling of roll call votes. Yet in most parliaments, roll call data suffer from two problems: selection bias d...

Automated and statistical methods for estimating latent political traits and classes from textual data hold great promise, since virtually every political act involves the production of text. Statistical models of natural language features, however, are heavily laden with unrealistic assumptions about the process that generates this data, including...

Despite the recent focus on scaling policy positions by treating political text as quantitative data, huge investments in political science continue to use expertcoded content analysis, namely the 30-year Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) of coded manifestos as well as the Comparative Policy Agendas Project (CAP). All text analysis methods requir...

Coding non-manifesto documents as if they were genuine policy platforms produced at election time clearly raises serious issues with error when these codings are used in the standard manner to estimate left-right policy positions. In addition to the long term solution of improving the document base of the Manifesto Project identified by Gemenis (20...

Spatial characterizations of agents’ preferences lie at the heart of many theories of political competition. These give rise to explicitly dimensional interpretations. Parties define and differentiate themselves in terms of substantive policy issues, and the configuration of such issues that is required for a good description of political competiti...

The course is intended to survey and characterize methods for systematically extracting information from text for social scientific purposes, starting with classical content analysis methods and proceeding forward to state of the art scaling methods for estimating quantities from text using statistical methods. The course lays a theoretical foundat...

The course is intended to survey and characterize methods for systematically extracting information from text for social scientific purposes, as well as to teach students how to apply these methods in practical research. It takes as a starting point more traditional methods of content analysis, but is aimed at the most recent advances in quantitati...

Party politics in the European Parliament (EP) consists of competition between transnational party groups, each consisting of multiple national member parties from the 27 member states of the European Union (EU). Identifying the policy space that these parties inhabit and their ideological positions is both practically and conceptually challenging....

The vast majority of previous efforts to estimate the policy preferences of individual legis- lators has relied on inductive scaling of roll-call votes. Yet roll call votes in most parliamen- tary systems suffer from a number of problems: many votes are not recorded, resulting in selection bias caused by the strategic use of roll call votes. More i...

Several methods have now become popular in political science for scaling latent traits— usually left-right policy positions—from political texts. Following a great deal of de-velopment, application, and replication, we now have a fairly good understanding of the estimates produced by scaling models such as "Wordscores", "Wordfish", and other varian...

Scholars estimating policy positions from political texts typically code words or sentences and then build left-right policy scales based on the relative frequencies of text units coded into different categories. Here we reexamine such scales and propose a theoretically and linguistically superior alternative based on the logarithm of odds-ratios....

The long time series of estimated party policy positions generated by the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) is the only such time series available to the profession and has been extensively used in a wide variety of applications. Recent work (e.g. Benoit, Laver, and Mikhaylov 2009; Klingemann et. al. 2006, chs. 4–5) focuses on non-systematic sour...

A BSTRACT Support for the political and economic integration of Europe has formed an increasingly important policy issue for Irish political parties as the European Union has grown in importance at both the domestic and European level. This article examines the political positioning of Irish parties on the issue of European integration, comparing t...

Paper presented at MPSA 2010, Chicago IL

Applying a coding scheme to discrete text units has long been the most common method for estimating substantive quantities of interest about the authors of these texts, whether for political, social, economic, or other substantive reasons. In po-litical analysis, researchers typically build scales of policy positions from the rela-tive frequencies...

Presidential systems present a unique possibility for spatial competition between elected political agents, since presidents may represent different policy positions than the parties to which they belong. Previous research, however, has lacked a firm empirical basis on which to measure these differences. We remedy this situation, providing independ...

Against a background of the Irish government’s concerns with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and the British government’s wishes for a more quantitative Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), our study conducts a relative impact assessment of the study of politics, government, political science, and international relations in Ireland. Impact is meas...

Political text offers extraordinary potential as a source of information about the policy positions of political actors. Despite recent advances in computational text analysis, human interpretative coding of text remains an important source of text-based data, ultimately required to validate more automatic techniques. The profession's main source o...

The use of “expert judgments“ as a research instrument is becoming increasingly popular in political science as a tool for obtaining knowledge about difficult to measure quantities. At its simplest, expert judgment methodology does “just what it says on the tin“ — namely, to provide information on some objective or subjective state of the world bas...

Party politics in the European Union (EU) is characterized by competition at two different levels. At the national level, political parties contest national, regional, and local elections. At a transnational level, national parties also compete in elections, for seats in the European Parliament (EP), the legislative body of the EU. National politic...

In “A Robust Transformation Procedure,” Martin and Vanberg (2007, hereafter MV) propose a new method for rescaling the raw virgin text scores produced by the “Wordscores” procedure of Laver, Benoit, and Garry (2003, hereafter LBG). Their alternative method addresses two deficiencies they argue exist with the transformation of virgin text scores pro...

A puzzle in research on campaign spending is that while expenditure is positively related to votes won, this effect is far more strongly, or even exclusively, enjoyed by challengers rather than by incumbents. We unearth a new explanation for the puzzle, focusing on the hidden, yet variable, campaign value of office perquisites which incumbents depl...

The long time series of estimated party policy positions generated by the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) is the only such time series available to the profession and has been extensively used in a wide variety of applications. Recent work (e.g. Benoit, Laver, and Mikhaylov 2007; Klingemann et. al. 2006, chs. 4–5) focuses on non-systematic sour...

Positive effects of campaign spending on electoral outcomes have been found in several comparative, multiparty contexts (e.g. Britain, France, Japan, and Australia) but very few of these systems use proportional representation (PR). The handful of studies that have examined spending effects in multi-party elections (e.g. Brazil, Flanders) have foun...

Ecological inference, as traditionally defined, is the process of using aggregate (i.e., ecological) data to infer discrete individual-level relationships of interest when individual-level data are not available. Existing methods of ecological inference generate very inaccurate conclusions about the empirical world- which thus gives rise to the eco...

For the first time in Irish electoral history, the 1999 local elections required candidates to publicly declare their campaign expenditures. Drawing on these data, we explore patterns in campaign spending and assess their impact, both on candidate success and on turnout. First, examining the elections contested by 1,838 candidates from 180 local co...

Positive effects of campaign spending on electoral outcomes have been found in several comparative, multiparty contexts (e.g. Britain, France, Japan, and Australia) but very few of these systems use proportional representation (PR). If positive effects from spending are robust, however, then we would also expect to find that they generalize to syst...

In this review article, I identify the key questions raised by the treatment of electoral systems not as causal influences on party systems but as effects or byproducts of party systems. Framing these questions in the context of the classic consequences-oriented study of electoral institutions, I first review the classic approach, which treats elec...

Spatial models of party competition are central to modern political science. Before we can elaborate such models empirically, we need reliable and valid measurements of agents' positions on salient policy dimensions. The primary empirical times series of estimated party positions in many countries derives from the content analysis of party manifest...

A well-known source of data on political party positions on policy is the decades-long comparative manifesto project (CMP). Measuring party positions on policy across time and space, this dataset has been the most widely cited source of party positions in comparative political studies of such phenomena as government duration and formation, electora...

In this paper we compare estimates of the left-right positions of political parties derived from an expert survey recently completed by the authors with those derived by the Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP) from the content analysis of party manifestos. Having briefly described the expert survey, we first explore the substantive policy content...

1. IntroductionBudge and Pennings (2007) criticize the ‘‘Word-scores’’ method for computerized content analysis onessentially two grounds. The first is that the best testof Wordscores accuracy is whether it can ‘‘reproducethe rich time series produced by the MRG/CMP cover-ing a 50 year period’’ (Budge and Pennings, 2007: 5),which Budge and Pennings...

This paper measures the extent of party system change – in terms of changes in the underlying policy space and in party positions within it – in Western European party systems. Change is measured using two directly comparable expert surveys of party positions on four “core” policy dimensions, conducted in 1989 and 2003. A distinction is made betwee...

A new and wide-ranging empirical overview of party policy in 47 modern democracies, including all of the new democracies of Eastern Europe. It updates and radically extends Policy and Party Competition (1992), which established itself as a key mainstream data source for all political scientists exploring the policy positions of political parties. T...

This paper measures the extent of party system change – seen as change in the underlying policy space and change in party positions in that space – in western European party systems. Change is measured using two directly comparable expert surveys of party positions on four "core" policy dimensions, conducted in 1989 and 2003. A distinction is made...

Mixed-member electoral systems require voters simultaneously to cast ballots in single-member districts (SMD) and multimember, proportional representation (PR) constituencies. It may be that not all parties offer candidates in both electoral contexts, however. In this event would-be voters for some parties may find themselves ‘frustrated’ by the re...

The French two-round system of presidential elections forces candidates to choose strategies designed to maximize their votes in two different, potentially conflicting strategic contexts: a first round contest between many candidates, and a second round between (typically) a left-and a right-oriented candidate. Following a constitutional change in...

Since its first publication in 1951, Duverger's Political Parties has influenced an entire branch of political science devoted to the study of the political consequences of electoral laws. This essay examines the two propositions known as Duverger's law and Duverger's hypothesis, both concerned with how electoral institutions shape party systems. F...

Hungary has a particularly complicated electoral system: a type of mixed system that incorporates three tiers of seat allocation, the use of a proportional allocation formula, and the allocation of a number of seats by a tworound system in single-member constituencies. Examination of the strategic incentives facing parties explains some surprising...

This paper first reviews a number of epistemological and methodological issues relating to the estimation of party policy positions, particularly in a comparative context, with special reference to the methodology of ‘expert surveys’. It is argued that expert surveys, as systematic summaries of the views of country specialists, have a particular ro...

The Convention on the Future of Europe that led to the eventual drafting of an EU Constitution involved numerous political actors from many countries. Their negotiations over the constitution generated a huge volume of texts containing substantive information about their preferences for EU institutional and political outcomes. In this paper, we att...

In this note we map the Irish policy space, locating both voters and parties on the most salient policy dimensions in Ireland. Estimates of the voter locations are based on the Irish National Election Survey (INES), conducted in 2002. Estimates of the party positions are based on an expert survey of party positions conducted by the authors in late...

The estimation of vote splitting in mixed-member electoral systems is a common problem in electoral studies, where the goal of researchers is to estimate individual voter transitions between parties on two different ballots cast simultaneously. Because the ballots are cast separately and secretly, however, voter choice on the two ballots must be re...

Electoral systems are commonly treated as exogenous determinants of political party systems, yet our theoretical understanding remains limited as to how these institutions themselves are determined. Part of the problem lies with the subject matter itself: electoral system change is frequently idiosyncratic, often occurring during episodes of except...

Introduction The broad objective of this paper is to better understand how national governments form their policy position on the Draft Constitutional proposal by analysing developments in Spain. It does so in three sections. After first considering different (theoretical) issues raised in Spanish policy-making literature, Section 1 examines the Sp...

Electoral systems are uniquely distributive political institutions that shape political outcomes, yet are themselves endogenously shaped outcomes of political choices. In Poland, party system development has involved not only parties adapting to electoral institutions in each election, but also parties modifying these institutions prior to every el...

Although perceived by candidates and parties as important in affecting political outcomes, the link between spending and success in multi- candidate, multiparty election campaigns remains unproven. Not only are there relatively few studies of campaign spending effects in multi- party systems, there are none examining the effect under the Single Tra...

Developments in the computerized analysis of political texts now make it much easier than before to investigate large volumes of political text in order to estimate the policy positions of the authors. Previous content analyses of party manifestos, for example, have relied on the hand coding of texts (Budge et al., 1987; Laver and Budge 1992, Kling...

Most existing theoretical work on party competition pays little attention to the evolution of party systems between elections as a result of defections between parties. In this article, we treat individual legislators as utility-maximizing agents tempted to defect to other parties if this would increase their expected payoffs. We model the evolutio...

We present a new way of extracting policy positions from political texts that treats texts not as discourses to be understood and interpreted but rather, as data in the form of words. We compare this approach to previous methods of text analysis and use it to replicate published estimates of the policy positions of political parties in Britain and...

This article adapts a new technique for the computerised analysis of political texts, previously used to analyse party manifestos, to the analysis of speeches made in a legislature. The benefits of computerised text analysis come from the ability to analyse, for the first time, complex and daunting electronic sources of text, such as the parliament...

Studies of electoral law consequences typically treat electoral laws as exogenous factors affecting political party systems, even while acknowledging that political parties often tailor electoral institutions to suit their own distributional needs. This study represents a departure from that approach, directly examining one aspect of the endogeneit...

Electoral coordination refers to the use by political parties of a concerted strategy that makes most effective use of electoral rules to maximize their interests in legislative elections. Coordination requires both strategic thinking and political discipline, however, and in relatively new democracies these conditions may not exist. In this study...

This paper adapts a new technique for the computerized analysis of political texts (Laver, Benoit and Garry, 2002), previously used to analyse party manifestos, to the analysis of speeches made in a legislature. The benefits of computerized text analysis come from the ability to analyse for the first time complex and daunting electronic sources of...

Existing work on party systems typically involves essentially static models and pays little attention to the dynamics of party splits and fusions. Our approach explores these dynamics by setting out a simple model of legislative behavior in a parliament responsible for making and breaking governments. This model abandons the unitary actor assumptio...

Institutions shape political outcomes, yet institutions themselves are endogenously shaped outcomes of political choices. Electoral systems are a unique class of distributive institutions that fundamentally shape political competition and political outcomes in democratic polities. Our paper examines the origins and subsequent changes to the Polish...

Institutions shape political outcomes, yet institutions themselves are endoge- nously shaped outcomes of political choices. Such choices are especially sig- nificant during transitions to democracy, when initial institutional designs fundamentally structure the path of democratic development. Most theories of institutional emergence, however, focus...

Duverger's propositions concerning the psychologicaland mechanical consequences of electoral rules have previously beenexamined mainly through the lens of district magnitude,comparing the properties of single-member district pluralityelections with those of multimember proportional representationelections. The empirical consequences of multi-member...

The new Italian electoral system has two elements, a plurality element in single member districts and a PR element in larger multimember constituencies. The plurality element provides strong incentives for groups of parties to form pre-electoral coalitions. The PR element offers incentives for parties to contest the elections individually. We can t...

Forecasting seat outcomes in legislative elections in countries with stable, two-party systems is sufficiently challenging as to have proven elusive for much of democratic experience. Forecasting an election in a relatively new democracy with a fluid multi-party system, therefore, would seem on its face to be a hopeless objective. In this paper I a...

Theory: Duverger's #Law" concerning the structural and psychological consequences of electoral rules has been much studied in both single cases and in multinational samples, but these su#er from several common theoretical and empirical shortcomings that make their estimates suspect. Besides resort to experimental data, another solution is to select...

A ranking exists in electoral systems research of different electoral formulas—the mathematical functions governing the conversion of votes into legislative seats—in terms of both proportionality of seats and votes and favorability to the largest party. I reexamine this issue with new methods and new evidence, attempting to cross-validate previous...

The electoral system adopted by Hungary in 1989 represents a monument to the potential for institutional design through bargaining to produce complex yet stable institutions. The key compromise reached during this bargaining process was the decision to use a mixed-member system, electing a roughly even number of representatives from both majoritari...

Studies of political institutions in general and electoral systems in particular have focused on their consequences; far less attention has been devoted to institutional emergence. The choice of an electoral system is especially critical for democratizing states, since electoral institutions fundamentally shape the democratic political competition...

Current consensus in the field of democratic peace research holds that democratic states go to war in general no less than nondemocratic states. The author challenges this consensus by reevaluating the main empirical studies on which it rests, using information that previous studies ignored and statistical techniques unused or even unknown at the t...

’Arguably the most complex parliamentary voting system in the world’. The following article describes the formulation of Hungary's ‘two‐vote’ system.

While many ways exist to estimate the policy positions of political parties, the undisputed champion in providing the most data across parties, countries, and time is the long-running Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP). The CMP's 56-category coding scheme has been applied to text units from more than 3,000 post-war party manifestos, generating cat...

Abstract will be provided by author.

Theories which explain the origins of institutions as the product of struggles for distributive advantage provide only a general framework with no conceptualization of the bargaining process and few applications to empirical cases. We address both problems and extend the distributive theory of institutional origins by drawing on a unique set of dat...

The comparative saliency of policy issues is central to numerous studies of dynamic representation, issue agendas, and issue competition in political science. To measure issue saliency, political scientists most commonly rely on party manifestos, principally the cross-national, time-series data from the Comparative Manifestos Project. Despite the c...

The economic and financial crisis in Europe has forced many governments to implement extremely unpopular austerity measures. This has not only split opposition and government parties, but also increased tensions between government members and party backbenchers who need to support unpopular government decisions. These tensions between party members...

Thesis (Ph. D. in Political Science)--Department of Government, Harvard University, 1998. Includes bibliographical references.