Mapping Policy Preferences: Estimates for Parties, Electors, and Governments 1945—1998
Abstract
This book uniquely enriches and empowers its readers. It enriches them by giving them the most detailed and extensive data available on the policies and preferences of key democratic actors-parties, governments, and electors in 25 democracies over the post-war period. Estimates are provided for every election and most coalitions of the post-war period and derive from the programmes, manifestos, and platforms of parties and governments themselves. Thus, they form a uniquely authoritative source, recognized as such and provided through the labour of a team of international scholars over 25 years. The book empowers readers by providing these estimates on the website http://manifestoproject.wzb.eu/MPP1. The printed text provides documentation and suggested uses for data, along with much other background information. The changing ideologies and concerns of parties trace general social developments over the post-war period, as well as directly affecting economic policy making. Indispensable for any serious discussion of democratic politics, the book provides necessary information for political scientists, policy analysts, comparativists, sociologists, and economists. A must for every social science library-private as well as academic or public.
... This classification of political issues is inspired by the ideological stands of parties according to socialclass politics, and is widely considered to be empirically meaningful and comprehensive (e.g. Budge et al., 2001;Klingemann et al., 2006). Relying on this coding, we can categorize any identity claim in an electoral manifesto according to its policy-issue domain and determine whether it aligns with a party's ideological (op)position. ...
... The Issue investment variable captures the relative weight that a party assigns to a particular political issue in each of the election manifestos. Following Budge et al. (2001), we operationalized this variable as the percentage of quasi-sentences a political party allocated to an issue in its manifesto. Issues not included by a political party in its manifesto are coded as receiving zero investments. ...
... This variable distinguishes between claims about political issues that are related (1) and unrelated (0) to the ideologically anchored identity of a party. The coding of this variable follows the Manifesto Project's description of political ideologies (Budge et al., 2001;Klingemann et al., 2006). By controlling for investments in unrelated but ideologically-adjacent as well as in neutral issues (see below, the section on control variables), the coefficient estimate of the established identity variable will be informative about the degree of investment into ideologically gorunded claims against oppositional ones. ...
Our research addresses how organizations manage a shift from a single to a hybrid identity, a question that the identity literature still is grappling with. We address this question by reflecting on how organizations develop hybrid identities in response to institutional decline. Identity hybridization, we predict, takes place in stages via strategies that gradually hybridize the identity. We study how British political parties hybridized their identities in response to the decline of social-class politics over the period 1950-2015. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of the identity projections of three political parties in their election manifestos provide support for our hypotheses.
... For much of the post-war period unity was the Conservative party's secret weapon. Figure 6 displays the positions of the three major parties on the left-right dimension (RILE score), as showed by content analyses of party manifestos (Budge et al. 2001;Allen and Bara 2021). The post-war consensus was shattered by economic crises in the 1960s and 1970s. ...
... The periodic shifts of the major parties had consequences-some immediate, some that played out over the longer-term (Nagel and Wlezien 2010). From 1955 to 1970 the two major parties were on average 14 points from each other according to the (right-left) RILE scores estimated by the Manifesto Research on Political Representation (MARPOR) team (Budge et al. 2001). From 1974 to 1992, the two major parties were on average 51 points away from each other according to their RILE scores. ...
Post-war electoral dynamics were framed by a two-party system that usually provided single party governments with a legislative majority. These conditions promoted a pendulum-like swing of votes between two parties that alternated in office. The electorate responded ‘thermostatically’ to governments by moving in the opposite direction to policy and imposed the ‘costs of ruling.’ The major parties competed by moderating their positions and building reputations for competence. They vacated the centre in the 1970s and suffered a loss of their reputations for competence, leading to an increase in the centre-party vote. When the Liberal Democrat vote collapsed after 2010, niche parties, such as Reform UK, the Greens, and the Scottish National Party, picked up support. These developments have produced increasingly complicated dynamics. The major parties now risk losing votes to parties on their flanks. This reduces the appeal of moderation and causes uncertainty about strategy. Governments still suffer from thermostatic effects and the costs of ruling, creating opportunities for a wider range of opposition parties. These dynamics will produce volatility that the plurality electoral system will amplify to produce even more astonishing electoral turnarounds, and complicate strategic decision-making for parties.
... The Left-Right spectrum is one of the most influential concepts in political science (Budge et al., 2001;Klingemann et al., 2006;Lakoff, 2016). What exactly constitutes left and right is, however, highly debated and seemingly contingent upon time and place (Bobbio, 1996;Jahn, 2010). ...
... Thus, we reach the conclusion that voters increasingly supported RRPs based on their positions on the Left-Right dimension (H3). This finding may reflect the growing normalisation of the RRPs, which benefitted electorally from the most important political divide in the history of Western Europe (Budge et al., 2001;Dalton et al., 2011). The literature has recurrently shown how RRPs have been primarily committed to introducing new dimensions of conflict, overshadowing the dominant political conflicts (the Left-Right dimension) to win over more votes (de Vries andHobolt, 2012, 2020). ...
In the past two decades, radical right parties gained ground, becoming relevant political actors in several European countries. This article presents an intriguing study on their voting preferences in Western Europe. It analyses whether and to what extent the effect of the distance between individual and party positions on the European Union, immigration and the Left–Right positioning has changed over time (between 2009 and 2019). This is examined by combining data from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey and the European Election Studies. The results suggest that the distance between Left–Right self-positioning and party position has become more important in explaining voting for radical right parties over time.
... Other important aspects are the ideological preferences of parties and the number of salient dimensions of competition (Wolinetz 2006). Unfortunately, the main methodologies for studying parties' policy preferences -the expert survey and the content analysis of parties' manifestos (Budge et al. 2001;Benoit and Laver 2006) − do not allow us to track the evolution of parties' ideal points and salient dimensions during the legislative term. 5 For this reason we exclude in our analysis any consideration related to the spatial structure of the space of competition. ...
... 5 For this reason we exclude in our analysis any consideration related to the spatial structure of the space of competition. 6 All indicators are measured on a daily 5 Both expert surveys and the analysis of party manifestos calculate party policy positions at fixed points in time, which usually correspond to elections (see Budge et al. 2001;Benoit and Laver 2006). 6 For an account of party system change in Italy from the perspective of the spatial approach to elections and party competition, see Pinto (2017, 2022). ...
Party systems and party system change have long been one of the most studied topics within the comparative politics literature, yet most work in this field focuses on changes that occur between elections, neglecting the possibility that parties and party systems may reconfigure during the inter-election period. Building on the studies on party system change, this paper aims to analyse how individual changes in party affiliation can aggregate into changes at the level of parliamentary party system in the 18 th Italian legislature. To achieve this goal, data on individual movements in the membership of parliamentary parties in the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies are used to track the extent of legislative party system change over time, as indicated by changes in the number of relevant parties, their relative size and strength, and the bargaining power of parliamentary groups in the Italian parliament. Overall, our results show major changes in the main features of the Italian parliamentary party system and the structure of competition in the 18 th legislature, returning the image of a fluid, unstable and constantly moving system.
... One of the most widely used scales for detecting political stance is left-right, where the candidates are arguably distinguished between a progressive (left) and conservative (right) position. Although there has been concerns about the validity of inferring the stances using only one axis (Kitschelt (1994); Jahn (2023)), this scale has been validated broadly across countries (Evans et al. (1996); Budge (2001)) and used as the basis for economic stance evaluation of LLMs in many previous works (Feng et al. (2023); Ceron et al. (2024); Agiza et al. (2024)). ...
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly shaping political discourse, yet their responses often display inconsistency when subjected to scrutiny. While prior research has primarily categorized LLM outputs as left- or right-leaning to assess their political stances, a critical question remains: Do these responses reflect genuine internal beliefs or merely surface-level alignment with training data? To address this, we propose a novel framework for evaluating belief depth by analyzing (1) argumentative consistency and (2) uncertainty quantification. We evaluate 12 LLMs on 19 economic policies from the Political Compass Test, challenging their belief stability with both supportive and opposing arguments. Our analysis reveals that LLMs exhibit topic-specific belief stability rather than a uniform ideological stance. Notably, up to 95% of left-leaning models' responses and 89% of right-leaning models' responses remain consistent under the challenge, enabling semantic entropy to achieve high accuracy (AUROC=0.78), effectively distinguishing between surface-level alignment from genuine belief. These findings call into question the assumption that LLMs maintain stable, human-like political ideologies, emphasizing the importance of conducting topic-specific reliability assessments for real-world applications.
... as an example use case, illustrates that the presented dataset contains statistical structure that allows one to conduct automated text data analyses with meaningful, interpretable outcomes. Illustrations of such analyses are Figs. 2 and 3, which present the proportion (in a logarithmic scale y-axis) of each Manifesto project topic [47][48][49] in the dataset, over the period of focus. The proportions per party (Democrats are denoted with *, Republicans with +) and over the complete dataset (denoted with ⋅ ) are plotted. ...
Unstructured text data have gained popularity in political science, owing to advancements in rigorous ‘text-as-data’ methods that allow extracting insights into election outcomes, candidates’ appeal to voters, ideologies and campaign strategies. Existing datasets on US presidential election campaign speeches are limited in size or source variation, and often contain speeches of different types (debates, rallies, official presidential events, e.g. inauguration), thus lacking consistency in their rhetorical content. The introduced dataset comprises the campaign speeches of the Democratic and Republican tickets for the 2020 US presidential election (1, 056 in total), covering the period between January 2019 and January 2021. Importantly, the dataset dictates specific criteria for the rhetorical structure of the speech ensuring consistency, critical for quantitative analysis. It has been carefully curated, yet only to the necessary extent to still be able to inform studies that require semantic or grammatical/syntactical structure. The provided corpus is hosted on Zenodo and GitHub under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license, and it aims to enhance timely studies on US presidential elections with high-quality text data.
... Instead, I argue, that party interests in environmental policy, and climate policy specifically, should be positioned on a continuum ranging from exclusively prioritizing the economy to an exclusive focus on environmental issues. Hence, I expect that pro-environmental government positions, measured along such a dimension based on CMP data 13,14 , are related to a more intensive carbon pricing policy. ...
Abtract
Carbon pricing policies are central climate policy instruments to limit global warming, but the instrument design in terms of price and emission coverage varies widely. Governments can set instrument designs that essentially make carbon pricing ineffective. To understand when serious measures against climate change are taken, we need to go beyond the question of which governments price carbon and focus on the specific design of the implemented instruments. Based on the literature of partisan theory in the context of climate policy, I analyze 21 OECD countries with implemented carbon pricing policies between 1990 and 2022. Results indicate that the government’s position constitutes a decisive element for climate policy measures in addition to institutional frameworks, economic conditions and situational pressures that can limit or expand a government’s ability to act. The structure of the temporal delay, though, is of central importance for policy analyses using first difference estimation.
... Marks et al. 2007, McDonald and Budge 2014, Laver 2014 for summaries). Some approaches favour the use of policy statements or votes (e.g., Schwarz et al. 2017), others the use of party manifestos or electoral programmes as summarising documents explicitly designed to communicate the positions that parties hold on a range of issues (e.g., Budge et al. 2001), while other scholars rely on the views of experts (e.g., Castles andMair 1984, Hooghe et al. 2010). ...
... First, multiple candidates who continue to shift their positions over time may overburden voters' cognitive capacity (Busch, 2016). As many candidates often move their policy positions, their positions might be perceived to overlap or leapfrog with each other (Budge & Klingemann, 2001). Thus, if voters fail to track those changes in candidate ideology, they are more likely to misestimate candidates' policy platforms (Adams et al., 2011(Adams et al., , 2014. 1 Second, candidates' ambiguous or vague campaign messages make it difficult for voters to gauge their current policy locations. ...
Can corruption scandals change voters’ perceptions of candidates’ ideological positions? While it is well established that competence shocks, such as corruption scandals, influence voters’ affective attachment to political elites and their perceived capacity to address social issues, this study explores how such shocks may also lead voters to perceive some candidates as more ideologically extreme. This phenomenon, known as the contrast effect, occurs when voters interpret signals of low competence as indicators of greater ideological distance from their preferred positions. This study focuses on a major corruption scandal in South Korea and examines its impact on voters’ perceptions of presidential candidates’ ideological positions. The findings reveal that during the election period, voters’ negative emotions towards the ex-president’s corruption led them to perceive greater ideological distance from certain candidates. Specifically, most centrist voters and those from one side of the political spectrum perceived the ‘corrupt’ party as moving further from their own ideological positions. This study highlights the importance of considering emotional responses to political events in shaping voters’ ideological perceptions and subsequent electoral choices.
... These scores indicate positions along a single left-right dimension (Budge et al. 2001). ...
In this paper we explain the variation in the Liberals'/Liberal Democrats' vote from 1945. We show that their vote increases as the major parties vacate the centre and as their relative reputations for competence declines. We provide estimates of the impact of their participation in a coalition government on their vote. We also propose a new explanation of Liberal Democrat vote based on the proportion of seats contested. We extend our analyses to show that the Conservative party responds to increases in Liberal Democrat vote by moving towards its polar position. We suggest that the Liberal Democrats fielded more candidates as the major parties vacated the centre, the policy mood shifted right and the relative competence of the Conservative party declined. We finally explore whether it is necessary to factor in the Liberal Democrats' strategic behaviour and perceptions of their competence to explain their vote or whether they owe their fortunes to the behaviour of the major parties and are 'just another bucket to spit in.' 3
... Lowe (2016) suggests that position estimated by such models is a low dimensional summary of the relative emphasis of one topic over another, compared to what would be expected by chance. This is consistent with a key assumption of the saliency theory of party competition (Budge et al., 2001), which posits that the policy differences between parties are determined by their contrasting emphases on different issues. In the context of GD statements, the CA model fitted to the count data of unique words captures countries' relative emphasis of different issues -and therefore the differences in their policy preferences. ...
Every year at the United Nations, member states deliver statements during the General Debate discussing major issues in world politics. These speeches provide invaluable information on governments' perspectives and preferences on a wide range of issues, but have largely been overlooked in the study of international politics. This paper introduces a new dataset consisting of over 7,701 English-language country statements from 1970-2016. We demonstrate how the UN General Debate Corpus (UNGDC) can be used to derive country positions on different policy dimensions using text analytic methods. The paper provides applications of these estimates, demonstrating the contribution the UNGDC can make to the study of international politics.
... First, right-and left-leaning governments hold fundamentally different views on the role of government in the economy (Allan & Scruggs, 2004;Budge, 2001;Garrett, 1998;Weymouth & Broz, 2013). Left-leaning politicians are typically more ideologically committed to maintaining regulatory authority to safeguard public welfare over investor rights. ...
This paper seeks to explain why some investor-state dispute cases are settled before reaching the ruling stage in democracies, focusing on disputes triggered by regulatory changes made by host government. Our argument is grounded in the domestic politics of the respondent country, specifically the partisan orientation of the incumbent government. When faced with regulatory investor claims, respondent governments must balance protecting domestic social welfare with promoting investment. Our theory is that right-leaning governments are more likely to settle because they are more willing to make regulatory concessions to appease foreign investors and attract investment. In contrast, left-leaning governments prefer arbitral rulings over settlements, as they view settlements as a capitulation to foreign investors’ demands at the expense of public welfare. Using original data from 335 investor-state disputes involving democratic host countries between 1994 and 2020, we find support for this claim. Moreover, we provide qualitative evidence from the investor-state dispute between TC Energy Corporation, a Canadian energy company, and the United States, as well as the investor-state disputes triggered by Argentina’s 2002 emergency measures, to confirm our hypothesized causal pathway linking government partisanship to the likelihood of settlement.
... Political domains have been categorised according to various schemes depending on the task. The Comparative Manifesto Project, CMP 2 [2] and the Comparative Agendas Project, CAP 3 developed two domain classification systems for comparative studies. ...
This paper addresses the semi-automatic subject area annotation of the Danish Parliament Corpus 2009-2017 in order to construct a gold standard corpus for automatic classification. The corpus consists of the transcriptions of the speeches in the Danish parliamentary meetings. In our annotation work, we mainly use subject categories proposed by Danish scholars in political sciences. The relevant subjects areas of the speeches have been manually annotated using the titles of the agendas items for the parliamentary meetings and then the subjects areas have been assigned to the corresponding speeches. Some subjects co-occur in the agendas, since they are often debated at the same time. The fact that the same speech can belong to more subject areas is further analysed. Currently, more than 29,000 speeches have been classified using the titles of the agenda items. Different evaluation strategies have been applied. We also describe automatic classification experiments on a subset of the corpus using feature extracted with NLP techniques. The best results (96% F-score) were obtained using features extracted from the agenda items. These results indicate that the gold standard corpus and agenda items can be used for automatically classify parliamentary debates with high accuracy.
... De gebruikte beleidsprioriteiten die in de schalen zijn opgenomen, met een korte beschrijving (overgenomen van Budge et al., 2001). ...
Dat in westerse landen steeds meer mensen in de gevangenis lijken te zitten, is volgens een invloedrijke theorie het gevolg van economische neoliberalisering. In dit artikel formuleren we een alternatieve verklaring, gebaseerd op de opkomst van een nieuwe politieke cultuur. Na een analyse van de vermeende groei van evangenispopulaties toetsen we de houdbaarheid van beide theorieën.
... De afhankelijke variabele stemgedrag is gemeten door de respondenten de vraag te stellen op welke partij zij zouden stemmen indien er nu verkiezingen zouden zijn. De antwoorden op deze vragen zijn vervolgens gehercodeerd in links-rechts scores aan de hand van een door Budge et al.(2001) ontwikkelde links-rechts schaal. 12 De schaal voor culturele progressiviteit bestaat uit een viertal indicatoren: de postmaterialisme-index van Inglehart, een schaal voor seksuele permissiviteit, een schaal voor opvattingen over traditionele en moderne rollen van mannen en vrouwen, en een schaal voor zelfbepaling dan wel conformisme als opvoedingswaarde. ...
Culturele en immateriële thema’s als vrijheid, orde en veiligheid zijn in de nieuwe politieke cultuur belangrijker geworden dan ‘oude’ economische thema’s. Dit heeft in veel westerse landen geleid tot een verschuiving in stemgedrag: hettraditionelepatroon van een linkse arbeidersklasse en een rechtse middenklasseis steeds verder afgekalfd. De ‘materiële’ verklaring voor deze ontwikkelingstelt dat door de toenemende welvaart economische kwesties steeds minder relevant zijn geworden, zodat immateriële thema’s zoals vrijheid en emancipatie aan belang wonnen. Een tweede, godsdienstsociologische verklaring, stelt dat culturele thema’s politiek steeds belangrijker zijn geworden door de toenemendeontkerkelijking. Peter Achterberg toetst deze twee verklaringen.
... Following the standard procedure in parliamentary studies, only significant parties are taken into account for government formation processes. That is, parties with extremely minor legislative seats are excluded from the analysis since their size in the legislature does not influence interparty negotiations 12 (Budge et al. 2001;Sartori 1979). In practical terms, parties with less than one percentage of seats in the legislature are disregarded. ...
Recent research has shed light on the impact of pre-electoral coalitions on government formation in presidential democracies. However, the fact that pre-electoral coalitions are not automatically transformed into coalition cabinets has often gone under the radar. In this article, I argue that the importance of pre-electoral pacts for government formation depends on the degree of legislative polarisation. When parties are distant from one another in the ideological spectrum, presidents face more difficulties in breaking away from the pre-electoral pact and rearranging their multiparty alliances. Conversely, when polarisation is not pervasive, presidents have more leeway to build coalition cabinets different from the ones prescribed by pre-electoral coalitions. Drawing on a dataset of thirteen Latin American countries, the results support my claim and suggest that the relationship between government formation and the concession of office benefits for pre-electoral coalition members is more nuanced than previously assumed.
... On the other hand, parties focus their attention on issues which are salient to voters and party supporters, particularly if these issues are electorally beneficial to parties (see, e.g., Klüver & Sagarzazu, 2016;Spoon & Klüver, 2014;Wagner & Meyer, 2014) -because voters judge them as being the most competent actors for handling this issue (see, e.g., Petrocik, 1996;Seeberg, 2017) -while simultaneously avoiding issues that are opportune for their opponents (see, e.g., Green-Pedersen & Mortensen, 2015;Kristensen, Green-Pedersen, et al., 2023;Seeberg, 2022). Our theoretical argument builds upon the latter strategy of political competition: the strategic manipulation of the saliency of issues, that is, parties' issue attention (Budge et al., 2001;Budge & Farlie, 1983;De Vries & Hobolt, 2020;Klingemann et al., 1994). ...
Well-functioning political representation presupposes that the substantive focus of parties‘ parliamentary efforts reflects the issues on which parties campaigned. Although the link between electoral campaigning and parliamentary practice is crucial for successful representation in modern democracies, we still have little evidence that the issues on which political actors campaigned are the ones they focus on in day-to-
day politics. We investigate the link between electoral campaigning and parliamentary
practice by examining the overlap between parties‘ issue attention in manifestos and parliamentary questions. Our results for parties‘ issue attention in local campaigns and
in local councils in Germany between 2011 and 2020 show that parties follow up on the issues they campaign on: The more parties emphasise an issue in their campaign, the more they pay attention to it in their parliamentary activities.
... The data provides the best available estimate of party saliency on territorial politics throughout the period under study. It is the predominant source of studies on parties' issue saliency and its advocates have defended its validity and reliability on different occasions (Budge et al., 2001;Budge & Pennings, 2007;Volkens et al., 2009). Furthermore, the face validity of the data comforts me in stressing its usefulness for this paper. ...
The impact of decentralization on ethno-territorial conflict is widely debated, but empirical analyses of ethnoterritorial party politics are scarce. This paper uses novel data on conflicts in power-sharing cabinets to explore the relation between decentralization and ethno-territorial conflicts in the case of Belgium (1979–2006). These data are analysed with the help of poisson and logistic regressions, which confirm the negative association between decentralization and conflict. In addition to institutions, the analyses also examine the relevance of issue saliency, regionalist parties' strength, regionalist cabinet participation, and the proximity of elections. The results contradict the paradox of federalism and add to contemporary debates on ethno-territorial politics, conflict management, and power-sharing.
... The data provide the best available estimate of party saliency on territorial politics throughout the period under study. It is the predominant source of studies on parties' issue emphasis and on different occasions, its advocates have thoroughly defended its validity and reliability (Budge, Klingemann, Volkens, Bara, & Tanenbaum, 2001;Budge & Pennings, 2007;Volkens, Bara, & Budge, 2009). Furthermore, the face validity of the data comforts me in stressing its usefulness in the context of this doctoral thesis. ...
The functioning of Belgium relies on the power-sharing of Flemish and Francophone
politicians. As this collaboration often proves to be particularly hard, the governability of Belgium and the feasibility of power-sharing is regularly questioned. In this respect, observers and scholars typically point towards the impact of the decentralization reforms that transformed Belgium into a peculiar federation. Decentralization is often promoted as a tool for conflict management, but according to the ‘paradox of federalism’, it might exacerbate tensions and undermine stability. As the debate goes on, a solid empirical view on the ethno-territorial clashes that burden everyday power-sharing is yet to be presented. This doctoral dissertation aims to address this lacuna. It sheds unprecedented light on over 1,000 cabinet conflicts in Belgium (1979-2018). Studying their characteristics, evolutions, outcomes, and several conflict determinants, two questions are tackled. (1) How did the ethno-territorial conflict in Belgian power-sharing cabinets evolve? (2) And how did decentralization impact this conflict? The results disprove the paradox thesis on all levels. There are fewer ethno-territorial clashes than in the past, the ones that still arise have a friendlier face, the pacification trends are statistically related to decentralization, and hollowing out the central level did not burden the process of conflict resolution in the long run. In making sense of these results, the author provides some counterweight to conventional views on bipolar federalism, the political incentives in split party systems, and the idea that the Belgian federal level has been emptied to a problematic degree.
We evaluate whether ChatGPT can be used to estimate the ideological positions of parties in real time. Compared to other methods, ChatGPT can be used at all times, with minimal cost, no technical skills, and for all parties, including new ones. In a validation exercise, we asked ChatGPT and a group of local experts to simultaneously estimate the positions of French political parties in the context of the 2024 European election on a series of issues from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey. We find that ChatGPT’s estimations are generally close to those of the expert survey, especially for major and salient political issues (left-right, European integration, immigration). However, it provides less accurate estimates on fringe issues (free market, asylum policies, urban–rural interests) and specific party characteristics (within-party division, issue blurring). Thus, ChatGPT shows strong potential as an alternative data source for estimating parties’ positions but should be used with caution.
A long-standing debate in research on the political attitudes of the mass public concerns the extent to which these attitudes are ideologically constrained. Another, more recent debate, asks whether these attitudes are indicative of more general social behavior. We investigated (1) how ideologically constrained the preferences of the mass public are and (2) whether ideological differences are associated with actual social behavior. To shed new light on these entrenched debates we employed a person-centered approach—latent profile analysis (LPA). A sample of German students ( N = 659) responded to a questionnaire assessing attitudes toward currently contested topics (e.g., immigration, environmental policy) and played the Public Goods Game. By means of LPA, we identified four rather distinct groups. The Normative (46.0%) and the Anti-gay (16.4%) expressed the average opinion on all issues, with the exception that the latter were strongly against gay rights. The Progressive (28.9%) supported, across all issues, greater equality. This group also gave most in the Public Goods Game. The Right-Wing (7.0%) had strong views that were exactly the reverse image of those of the Progressive. Women were disproportionately progressive, and men Right-Wing or Anti-gay. Non-native speakers were disproportionately Anti-gay. We suggest that the Progressive and the Right-Wing were ideologically constrained in the customary sense—they were consistent from one issue to the next. We argue that the Normative and Anti-gay were also ideologically constrained—those believing themselves to have stepped out of ideology are in our interpretation the most enslaved by ideology.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine, with its implications for European security, has intensified the need to understand European public opinion on potential conflict strategies. This study delves into the formation of these opinions, focusing on utilitarian factors like economic interests and threat perception, and ideological elements such as political orientation, national identity and perceptions of Russia and Ukraine. Utilising a two-wave panel survey from five European Union (EU) countries, our findings underscore that ideological factors, especially trust in Russia and Ukraine are paramount in shaping support for escalation or de-escalation. Economic concerns, threat perceptions, right-wing ideologies and strong national identities also play significant roles. This research not only illuminates European sentiment on the war in Ukraine but also enriches broader discussions on the determinants of public opinion in international conflicts.
The level of attention parties devote to specific issues is one of the key factors in parties' electoral campaign strategies. Research so far only scarcely focused on parties' attention towards specific issues at the subnational level-even though some issues are primarily dealt with at this level. Building on a novel data set covering 679 regional election manifestos in Austria and Germany between 1990 and 2019, we assess the influence of party-specific and contextual factors on subnational parties' issue attention. More specifically, we hypothesize that a party's national issue ownership has a positive influence on its issue attention in regional election manifestos. This effect should, however, be moderated by whether a regional party is in government at the regional and/or national level. Our results support our hypotheses: While issue ownership has a positive influence, government participation decreases this effect.
This article presents a novel framework for analysing the politics of eco-social policies, focusing on the political conflicts surrounding this third generation of social risks. We distinguish two key dimensions of conflict: an ideational approach dimension, which focuses on conflicts among political actors over the possible synergies and trade-offs between social and ecological goals and their potential integration through eco-social policies, and a design dimension with several sub-dimensions related to the formulation and implementation of eco-social policies. To illustrate the merit of this analytical framework, we apply it to the analysis of party manifestos for the 2021 German federal election. Our findings reveal a striking divergence in the first dimension: While most parties emphasise the synergy potential of eco-social policies, albeit to varying degrees, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) stands out by opposing this narrative. The second dimension largely reflects established welfare positions, with centre-left and left-wing parties advocating state involvement and social consumption (the Social Democratic Party of Germany [SPD], the Greens, and The Left) and selective/needs-oriented measures (SPD and The Left) to a greater extent than centre-right parties (Christian Democratic Union of Germany [CDU]/Christian Social Union in Bavaria [CSU] and Free Democratic Party [FDP]). Furthermore, pro-growth approaches dominate, but there are signs that positions on degrowth policies may emerge as a significant conflict line in the future. Our analysis shows that eco-social policy conflicts are multidimensional, partly reshaping the political landscape around welfare policies, and are about not only how eco-social policies should be designed but whether they can and should be pursued at all.
Recent empirical research points at the significance of issue salience for party competition and argues that small parties emphasize secondary issues. This article investigates parties’ salience strategies from a formal viewpoint. It presents a model of party competition that allows parties to compete with policy positions on a second dimension, and also to choose an optimal level of issue salience. Equilibrium results are computed based on artificial data. The results identify various relevant factors for policy divergence and emphasis on the second policy issue dimension, notably the structure of public opinion and non-policy related valence differences. The results suggest that it is not only challenger parties at the fringe, but also valence-advantaged parties that seek to push the salience of secondary policy issues.
We use instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4, Llama 3, MiXtral, or Aya to position political texts within policy and ideological spaces. We ask an LLM where a tweet or a sentence of a political text stands on the focal dimension and take the average of the LLM responses to position political actors such as US Senators, or longer texts such as UK party manifestos or EU policy speeches given in 10 different languages. The correlations between the position estimates obtained with the best LLMs and benchmarks based on text coding by experts, crowdworkers, or roll call votes exceed .90. This approach is generally more accurate than the positions obtained with supervised classifiers trained on large amounts of research data. Using instruction-tuned LLMs to position texts in policy and ideological spaces is fast, cost-efficient, reliable, and reproducible (in the case of open LLMs) even if the texts are short and written in different languages. We conclude with cautionary notes about the need for empirical validation.
Due to the widespread use of large language models (LLMs), we need to understand whether they embed a specific “worldview” and what these views reflect. Recent studies report that, prompted with political questionnaires, LLMs show left-liberal leanings (Feng et al., 2023; Motoki et al., 2024). However, it is as yet unclear whether these leanings are reliable (robust to prompt variations) and whether the leaning is consistent across policies and political leaning. We propose a series of tests which assess the reliability and consistency of LLMs’ stances on political statements based on a dataset of voting-advice questionnaires collected from seven EU countries and annotated for policy issues. We study LLMs ranging in size from 7B to 70B parameters and find that their reliability increases with parameter count. Larger models show overall stronger alignment with left-leaning parties but differ among policy programs: They show a (left-wing) positive stance towards environment protection, social welfare state, and liberal society but also (right-wing) law and order, with no consistent preferences in the areas of foreign policy and migration.
We investigate whether and how partisan politics played a role in the Netherlands. To do so, we review existing literature and prepare descriptive statistics from recent datasets. We focus on two related questions: (i) Are there effects of partisan politics in the Netherlands in the past 60 years? (ii) Do developments in party and voter behavior influence the relevance of partisan influences for Dutch governance? As we find that there is only limited existing research on partisan politics in the Dutch context, we empirically explore the relationship between government ideology and typical, country-level partisan outcome variables. We find mixed evidence for partisan policymaking in the Netherlands. Some findings are in line with partisan theory, some are counter-indicative. Exploring the role of party and voter movements, we document a shifting political landscape in which the potential for traditional partisan influences has become smaller.
Based on 3,392 planks culled from all existing 45 Democratic Party platforms since 1840, it documents the party’s evolution from slavery to equality over three eras:
• extolling States' Rights from 1828 to 1896,
• practicing Cooperative Federalism from 1900 to1948, and
• embracing National Authority since 1952.
The Republican Evolution: From Governing Party to Antigovernment Party, 1860-2020 was published in 2022 by Columbia University Press. It documents the GOP’s evolution over three different
eras:
• Nationalism from 1860 to 1924,
• Neoliberalism from 1928 to 1960, and
• Ethnocentrism since 1964.
It is based on 2,722 planks culled from 41 Republican Party platforms to 2020. The GOP planks are also available at www.partypolitics.org.
Chapter 15, “Party Evolutions and Evolutionary Theories,” in The Democratic Evolution, compares the parties’ experiences.
In 173 pages, I analyze 3,392 planks that I culled from all existing 45 Democratic Party platforms since 1840. Referring to scores of tables and figures, I present evidence and argue that Democrats policies evolved from slavery to equality over three eras: from 1828-1896 they extollred States' Rights; from 1900-1948 they practiced Cooperative Federalism; and since 1952 they have embraced National Authority.
This study explores the role played by a country's political environment in the origin and effect of government spending. Using a rich data set that contains time‐varying ideological party positions, I show that both government ideology and the timing of elections are key determinants of government spending shocks and Granger‐cause government spending shocks estimated from traditional structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) models that ignore political considerations. I find that the magnitude of the spending multiplier depends on the political context: highly polarized countries have smaller multipliers relative to countries with a low degree of polarization, and established democracies have smaller multipliers than younger democracies.
Environmental Sustainability is significant to the health of natural cycles on earth. India can prove to be pivotal in addressing a slew of global environmental issues by acting locally. Therefore, understanding of the commitments of the National Political Parties of India as informed by their election manifestos is important. The manifestos apprise the voters of the promises and are deemed to report the aspirations of the voters. Drawing inspiration from these facts, the paper aims to study the issues and environment-related commitments in the Indian political landscape through a time-series, qualitative, secondary-data analysis of the election manifestos of the National Political Parties of India over five electoral seasons). It was observed that issues related to environment have grown in volume in the manifestos through the years, but inconsistency of issues is rampant from one season to the next. The data over the years has been divided into several categories for ease of study. Newer environmental issues have found feet but the lack of systemic integration only goes to show the inadequacy of the promises to foster sustainability. Increased focus on environment, expressed as public sentiment and greater inclusion of environmental concerns and promises in the election manifestos, can help develop at least a theoretical environmental outlook for India, which can prove to be an initial step towards actual growth of environmental sustainability.
The exploration of the internal relationships within parties is one of the most difficult and extensive fields of party research. In particular, internal power and influence relationships are hardly penetrable and transparent. The resource equipment of parties is much better, with party financing on the one hand and the recruitment and participation of voluntary members on the other hand, being the main interest of research. How the party apparatus was modernized and professionalized for the requirements of media election campaigns has also met with broad research interest. The way in which processes of political course-determination and elite recruitment as well as candidate nomination are handled in parties is dealt with under the keyword of intra-party democracy. It raises the question of intra-party power relations. There is controversy over the extent to which the classic oligarchy theory of Robert Michels can be countered and whether it is more appropriate to assume elite competition and a broadly stratified intra-party power structure. The examination of the intra-party participation of members focuses on the extent to which the party base can participate in personnel and political decisions. This also includes program work, coupled with the question of what role programs play for parties as political tendency operations.
O artigo tem por objeto o projeto político do partido português Chega, criado em 2019. Versa, ainda, sobre a possível ocorrência de uma relação entre o legado do salazarismo (1933-1968), referente ao período em que António Salazar (1889-1970) comandou Portugal, com a atual plataforma desta agremiação partidária. O objetivo é analisar se existem consideráveis pontos de convergência com os ideais salazaristas que possam representar uma continuidade das políticas encampadas pelo ditador português e o atual projeto do partido, ou se o Chega é uma força de extrema-direita sem ligação com o ideário de Salazar. Qualitativo e exploratório, o artigo utilizar-se-á de fontes primárias produzidas pelo partido e de fontes secundárias, como artigos científicos, livros e matérias jornalísticas. A questão que norteia esta investigação é: que elementos permitem considerar o Chega como um herdeiro de ideias salazaristas e/ou distanciá-lo desta perspectiva dentro da realidade política portuguesa? Conclui-se, portanto, que o Chega não pode ser necessariamente identificado, ao menos no presente momento, como um herdeiro do salazarismo, embora o projeto de revisão constitucional e de reforma do Estado propostos pelo partido remetam diretamente às propostas de Salazar que levaram à criação do Estado Novo e à extensão do regime autoritário em Portugal até o ano de 1974.
Do policy priorities that candidates emphasize during election campaigns predict their subsequent legislative activities? We study this question by assembling novel data on legislative leadership posts held by Japanese politicians and using a fine-tuned transformer-based machine learning model to classify policy areas in over 46,900 statements from 1270 candidate manifestos across five elections. We find that a higher emphasis on a policy issue increases the probability of securing a legislative post in the same area. This relationship remains consistent across multiple elections and persists even when accounting for candidates’ previous legislative leadership roles. We also discover greater congruence in distributive policy areas. Our findings indicate that campaigns provide meaningful signals of policy priorities.
This article complements Wlezien’s review of ‘conceptualisation, measurement and interpretation in representational research’ by considering how these operate within five predictive theories validated against comparative evidence, as recommended for cumulative research by Taagepera: and related to their wider institutional and methodological context by Budge. Methodologically, the article illustrates how predictive theories can be set up to explain political processes and validated against statistical evidence. Substantively, the theories both highlight and resolve the ‘Paradox of democracy’ – how can ideologically based political parties effectively match public policy to popular preferences with only weak guidance from citizens?
Technological change often increases demand for high-skilled jobs, with low-skilled losers turning to the populist right in response. The political effects of technological change that increases demand for low-skilled workers are largely unknown. The growth of the salmon fish-farming industry in rural Norway improved the labor-market situation for low-skilled workers, and we find that support for the populist right-wing party increased in municipalities that benefitted from the industry growth. The electoral change is due to a right-wing shift on the economic, but not the cultural dimension. Our results support political economy frameworks that point to lower demand for state interventions after positive labor market shocks, but raise the question of in what contexts support for populism will decline.
Heads of state in parliamentary democracies are usually perceived as neutral and non‐partisan political actors. However, they can make autonomous political choices, sometimes oriented by their own partisan preferences. Focusing on the Italian case, we analyze the propensity of the president of the Republic to publicly express political disagreement by rejecting the promulgation of laws. We contribute to the literature by creating and exploiting a new dataset, based on a content analysis of presidents' investiture speeches and New Year's Eve messages which maps the ideological position of Italian heads of state and their distance from the cabinet over more than 75 years (1946–2022). We show that such ideological distance increases the number of laws rejected by the president. This effect holds when controlling for the size and heterogeneity of the government coalition, as well as the state of the economy and the occurrence of crises.
Cabinets and Coalition Bargaining: The Democratic Life Cycle in Western Europe provides a comprehensive analysis of coalition politics in Western Europe over the post-1945 period. It champions a dynamic approach using bargaining and transaction cost theory to understand the ‘life cycle ‘ of parliamentary politics. After a review of the literature the theory chapter addresses the roles of bargaining and transaction costs in coalition governance. Eight comparative chapters address the topics of government formation, cabinet membership, coalition agreements, portfolio allocation, conflict management, cabinet termination and duration, and the electoral consequences of coalition politics. The book is based on the most comprehensive data set ever employed in coalition studies, which includes both coalitional and single-party countries and governments. Each chapter provides a comparative overview of its topic and state-of-the art statistical analysis. Conceptually and empirically the study argues for an integrated approach to coalition politics, stressing six clusters of explanatory factors: country-specific and temporal circumstances, ‘structural attributes ‘, actors ‘ preferences, institutions, the bargaining environment, and ‘critical events ‘. While the importance of different causal factors varies between the various phases of the parliamentary life cycle, no facet of coalition politics can be understood without reference to several of these factors. Comparative Politics is a series for students and teachers of political science that deals with contemporary issues in comparative government and politics. The General Editors are David M. Farrell, Jean Monnet Chair in European Politics and Head of School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester and Alfio Mastropaolo, University of Turin. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research.
Cabinets and Coalition Bargaining: The Democratic Life Cycle in Western Europe provides a comprehensive analysis of coalition politics in Western Europe over the post-1945 period. It champions a dynamic approach using bargaining and transaction cost theory to understand the ‘life cycle ‘ of parliamentary politics. After a review of the literature the theory chapter addresses the roles of bargaining and transaction costs in coalition governance. Eight comparative chapters address the topics of government formation, cabinet membership, coalition agreements, portfolio allocation, conflict management, cabinet termination and duration, and the electoral consequences of coalition politics. The book is based on the most comprehensive data set ever employed in coalition studies, which includes both coalitional and single-party countries and governments. Each chapter provides a comparative overview of its topic and state-of-the art statistical analysis. Conceptually and empirically the study argues for an integrated approach to coalition politics, stressing six clusters of explanatory factors: country-specific and temporal circumstances, ‘structural attributes ‘, actors ‘ preferences, institutions, the bargaining environment, and ‘critical events ‘. While the importance of different causal factors varies between the various phases of the parliamentary life cycle, no facet of coalition politics can be understood without reference to several of these factors. Comparative Politics is a series for students and teachers of political science that deals with contemporary issues in comparative government and politics. The General Editors are David M. Farrell, Jean Monnet Chair in European Politics and Head of School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester and Alfio Mastropaolo, University of Turin. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research.
Este artículo usa el marco teórico, y la metodología, del policy agenda de Baumgartner y Jones, para estudiar los discursos del 21 de mayo de los presidentes de la Concertación con el objeto de determinar la importancia, los cambios y la continuidad que las áreas de salud y educación poseen en la agenda pública.
Does party system polarization mobilize voters? Polarization is increasingly shaping democratic competition across Europe. While often perceived to be negative, polarization can be an effective remedy against voter disengagement. This paper investigates two distinct, but often conflated mechanisms, which could explain why polarization leads to mobilization. Spatial polarization of parties diversifies electoral options at the ballot, while affective polarization mobilizes based on emotional considerations. This article then shows the link between polarization and turnout across 22 European countries. The results are complemented by a difference-in-differences analysis of German local elections. However, voting results alone do not inform about the mechanism at play. Survey data is used to show that negative affect appears to be the main driver of voter participation. Party polarization thus has ambivalent consequences for democracies: It mobilizes the electorate, but its effect is driven by negative emotions.
A central theme emerging from recent research on party competition is that political actors sometimes remain deliberately opaque in their communication. This phenomenon has been investigated under labels such as position-blurring, ambiguity, issue clarity or ideological clarity. In this paper we propose a distinction between two concepts that are sometimes conflated in this literature: ambiguity and vagueness. While ambiguity means that there is substantial variance in parties' positional signals, vagueness denotes political statements that are non-committal in terms of the policy action to be taken or the outcome to be achieved. We explore the co-variation of these two dimensions and their relationship to issue ownership and government status using manifesto data produced by the Austrian National Election Study. These data are unique in that they provide detailed positional information as well as information on policy commitment (election pledges). We show that the two dimensions are uncorrelated and have opposite relationships with issue ownership (vagueness positive, ambiguity negative). We conclude that analyses of position-blurring in party competition should take different strategies of non-clarity in party communication into account.
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