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Checking the Party Policy Estimates: Reliability
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.
... Besides providing comparative results to other methods' estimates of party positions (Hearl 2001;McDonald and Mendes 2001;Laver et al. 2003), the CMP dataset also covers a large amount of countries, parties and elections which are needed to conduct the analysis. 1 Moreover, scholars argue (Ingelhart 1990) and empirically show (Benoit and Laver 2006: 158) that the left-right dimension is dominant in west-European politics. ...
... 6 These countries are: Denmark (1975( -2001( ), Belgium (1977( -2003, the Netherlands (1977( -1998( ), Germany (1976, the United Kingdom and Ireland . ...
This study examines whether parties respond to their supporters or to the median voter position. Party leaders require the support of the 'selectorate', which is defined as the group that has influence in party leadership selection. Inclusive parties, which rely on rank-and-file membership to select their leaders, will respond to their members. Exclusive parties, which rely on office-seeking members for leadership selection, will respond to the median voter position. Thus, intra-party institutions that (dis)enfranchise party members are crucial for understanding whether a party responds to their supporters (or to the median voter position). Using data from 1975-2003 for six West European countries, this article reports findings that inclusive parties respond to the mean party supporter position. While there is evidence that exclusive parties respond to the median voter position in two-party systems, this finding does not extend to multiparty systems. This study has implications for the understanding of intra-party institutions and political representation.
... However, there are strong arguments for using the left-right dimension to understand party competition in post-Communist democracies (Marks et al. 2006, p. 169;Pop-Eleches and Tucker 2011;McAllister and White 2007). 74 Hearl 2001;McDonald and Mendes 2001;Laver, Benoit, and Garry 2003. 75 See also Böhmelt et al. 2016;Böhmelt et al. 2017. ...
Political parties learn from foreign incumbents, that is, parties abroad that won office. But does the scope of this cross-national policy diffusion vary with the party family that generates those incumbents? The authors argue that party family conditions transnational policy learning when it makes information on the positions of sister parties more readily available and relevant. Both conditions apply to social democratic parties. Unlike other party families, social democrats have faced major competitive challenges since the 1970s and they exhibit exceptionally strong transnational organizations—factors, the authors contend, that uniquely facilitate cross-national policy learning from successful parties within the family. The authors analyze parties’ policy positions using spatial methods and find that social democratic parties are indeed exceptional because they emulate one another across borders more than do Christian democratic and conservative parties. These findings have important implications for our understanding of political representation and of social democratic parties’ election strategies over the past forty years.
... 4 It is the most important dimension for issue competition (Huber and Powell 1994;Powell 2000; see also McDonald and Budge 2005). The CMP left-right measure is broadly consistent with those derived using other methods (Hearl 2001;McDonald and Mendes 2001;Laver, Benoit, and Garry 2003; see also Marks, Hooghe, Steenbergen, and Bakker 2007). We rescale the CMP scores from one (extreme left) to ten (extreme right) to make it consistent with the median voter scale we use. ...
Previous research suggests that political parties learn from and emulate the successful election strategies of governing parties in other countries. But what explains variation in the degree of influence that governing parties have on their foreign counterparts? We argue that clarity of responsibility within government, or the concentration of executive responsibility in the hands of a dominant governing party, allows parties to learn from the most obviously electorally successful incumbents. It therefore enhances the cross-national diffusion of party programs. To test this expectation, we analyze parties’ policy positions in twenty-six established democracies since 1977. Our results indicate that parties disproportionately learn from and emulate dominant, high-clarity foreign incumbents. This finding contributes to a better understanding of the political consequences of government clarity and sheds new light on the heuristics that engender party-policy diffusion by demonstrating that the most visible foreign incumbents, whose platforms have yielded concentrated power in office, influence party politics “at home.”
... And since the content of party programs is often the result of intense intra-party debate, the CMP estimates should be reliable and accurate statements about parties' positions at the time of elections. Research has found these measures to be generally consistent with those from other party positioning studies, such as those based upon expert placements, citizen perceptions of parties' positions, and parliamentary voting analyses (Hearl 2001 Notes. Data are from the IntUne project (www.intune.it). ...
Conventional wisdom has it that political parties have incentives to respond to public opinion. It is also conventional wisdom that in open economies, policymakers must also “respond” to markets. Research on representation has provided ample evidence in support of the first claim. Research on the political economy of globalization has not, however, provided evidence for the second. This article examines the effects of globalization on how parties respond to voters. We argue that while elections motivate parties to respond to public sentiment, economic interdependence distracts political elites from their electorates and toward market actors, reducing party responsiveness to the mean voter. Evidence from a pair of distinct data sources spanning elections in twenty advanced capitalist democracies from the 1970s to 2010 shows that while parties have incentives to respond to left-right shifts in the mean voter position, they only do so when the national economy is sufficiently sheltered from the world economy. These findings have implications for party strategies, for representation, and for the broader effects of market integration.
... David Hearl (1987, p. 237) mentioned that when some Belgian programmes were coded by two different coders, there were few discrepancies, although the discrepancies were 'not quantified'. Elsewhere, the CMP attempted to measure reliability by comparing the coding results before and after 1983.The tests performed by Hearl (2001) included a comparison of means and a comparison of factor analyses between the two parts of the data set. Such tests, however, are uninformative with regard to coder reliability. ...
The Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP) data are the most popular source for parties' positions on the left–right and other ideological and policy dimensions. Over the past few years, several researchers have identified various methodological problems in the CMP data, but third-party users rarely acknowledge them. This article classifies the problems associated with the CMP into four areas: (1) theoretical underpinnings of the coding scheme; (2) document selection; (3) coding reliability; and (4) scaling. The article reviews each area systematically and concludes with a set of recommendations regarding the use of the CMP data.
... However, none of these data sets covers the range of issues, countries, and the time-period the CMP data cover. Moreover, the CMP party program codings generally correlate with these other widely used data sets on party positioning (Hearl, 2001; Laver et al., 2003). at election t, or by -1 if the party has moved away from the government's position. ...
No-confidence motions (NCMs) are attempts by opposition parties to publicise the government's failings in a salient policy arena, and previous research has shown that they often negatively affect citizens' evaluations of governing parties' competence and damage their electoral prospects. Yet currently there is a lack of understanding of how opposition parties respond ideologically to these NCMs. It is argued in this article that opposition parties should distance themselves from the government challenged by NCMs to show that they are different from the incompetent government and to compete for the votes that the government is likely to lose. Using a sample of 19 advanced democracies from 1970–2007, empirical evidence is presented that NCMs encourage political parties to move their positions away from the government's position, especially in the presence of reinforcing negative signals about government performance. These results have important implications for our understanding of opposition party policy change, for the economic voting literature, and for the spatial and valence models of party competition.
... Indeed, these measures are generally consistent with those from other party positioning studies, such as those based on expert placements, citizen perceptions of parties' positions, and parliamentary voting analyses. This provides additional confidence in the longitudinal and cross-national reliability of these estimates (see Hearl, 2001;Laver, Benoit, & Garry, 2003). 9 Although the methods used by the CMP to map party policy positions based on election programs are described at length elsewhere, we briefly review these methods here. ...
The authors examine the relationship between the variation of policy choices on offer in a party system and citizen satisfaction. Cross-national analyses, based on 12 countries from 1976 to 2003, are presented that suggest that when party choices in a political system are more ideologically proximate to the mean voter position in left–right terms, overall citizen satisfaction increases. The central implication of this finding is that party positions matter for understanding within-country changes in satisfaction.
... While expert surveys and public opinion data have been proposed as alternatives, they do not cover the range of issues, countries, and the time-period that the CMP data cover. Moreover, the CMP party programme codings generally correlate with other widely used datasets on party positioning, such as expert surveys, party placements of election survey respondents, and other word-scoring techniques (Hearl, 2001;Laver et al., 2003). 6 Nevertheless, we tested our model using directional change rather than the magnitude of change as the dependent variable. ...
Abstract will be provided by author.
... Indeed, these measures are generally consistent with those from other party positioning studies, such as those based on expert placements, citizen perceptions of parties' positions and parliamentary voting analyses. This provides additional confidence in the longitudinal and cross-national reliability of these estimates (see Hearl, 2001;Laver et al., 2003;McDonald and Mendes, 2001). 5 While the methods used by the CMP to map party policy positions based on election programmes are described at length elsewhere, we briefly review these methods here. ...
Do political parties respond to shifts in the preferences of their supporters, which we label the partisan constituency model, or to shifts in the mean voter position (the general electorate model)? Cross-national analyses — based on observations from Eurobarometer surveys and parties’ policy programmes in 15 countries from 1973 to 2002 — suggest that the general electorate model characterizes the policy shifts of mainstream parties. Alternatively, when we analyse the policy shifts of Communist, Green and extreme Nationalist parties (i.e. ‘niche’ parties), we find that these parties respond to shifts in the mean position of their supporters. The findings have implications for spatial theories and political representation.
Previous research suggests that political parties respond to left–right policy positions of successful foreign political parties (“foreign leaders”). We evaluate whether this is an effective electoral strategy: specifically, do political parties gain votes in elections when they respond to successful foreign parties? We argue that parties that follow foreign leaders will arrive at policy positions closer to their own (domestic) median voter, which increases their electoral support. The analysis is based on a two-stage model specification of parties’ vote shares and suggests that following foreign leaders is a beneficial election strategy in national election because it allows them to better identify the position of their own median voter. These findings have important implications for our understanding of political representation, parties’ election strategies, and for policy diffusion.
Objective
We address whether intraparty democracy conditions political parties’ responsiveness to rival parties’ policy shifts.
Method
We estimate parameters of a spatial econometric model of parties’ policy positions in 11 established democracies.
Results
Internally democratic parties respond to shifts in rival parties’ policies, and internally undemocratic parties do not respond to rival parties’ policy shifts.
Conclusion
We argue that this occurs because intraparty deliberation provides a channel through which rival parties influence their competitors’ policies. Because rank‐and‐file party members are influenced by deliberative processes more than party leaders—and the policy goals of internally democratic parties’ policies are heavily influenced by their party members—deliberative processes lead democratic parties to respond to shifts in rival parties’ policy positions. This work has important implications for our understanding of parties’ election strategies, intraparty politics, and how policies diffuse between parties competing in the same election.
Do parties learn from or emulate parties in other political systems? This research develops the argument that parties are more likely to employ the heuristic of learning from and emulating foreign successful (incumbent) parties . Spatial-econometric analyses of parties’ election policies from several established democracies robustly confirm that political parties respond to left-right policy positions of foreign political parties that have recently governed. By showing that parties respond to these foreign incumbent parties , this work has significant implications for our understanding of party competition. Furthermore, we contribute to the literature on public policy diffusion, as we suggest that political parties are important vehicles through which public policies diffuse.
Political parties seek information about public preferences to determine how much they need to change their policies as elections approach. We argue that opposition parties can use European parliamentary election results to inform themselves about public preferences. When opposition parties lose votes at the European level, they can use this information to infer that public opinion has shifted away from the party and change their national policy strategies. We also argue that not all European elections are the same and that parties should be more responsive to those European elections that are more informative about public preferences. Empirical results from 14 European Union (EU) member countries show that opposition parties use European election results and change their positions (a) when the turnout levels between national and European elections are similar and (b) when the European election is close in time to the upcoming national election.
Do parties’ valence characteristics affect their policy strategies? The verdict of the spatial modeling literature on the positioning effects of valence is mixed on this point. Some spatial studies argue that valence-advantaged parties/candidates should moderate their policies, while others argue that they should radicalize their policies. Empirical cross-national work on this issue has been lacking. Using an original measure of valence and party positioning data compiled by the Comparative Manifesto Project, the period 1976–2003 is analyzed in this article for nine West European countries. The findings suggest that as parties’ character-based valence attributes worsen they tend to moderate their Left–Right positions, and there is a notable time lag in parties’ responses to changes in their character-based valence attributes.
A positive relationship between economic performance and support for incumbents is routinely taken as evidence that elections work for accountability. Recent investigations into this relationship have examined just how signals from the economy translate into popular support. However, neither selection models nor sanctioning models explicitly incorporate the actions of political elites. This article advances a strategic parties model of economic voting. Political incumbents have incentives to adjust their policy positions in response to economic conditions. When parties advocate distinct positions on economic issues, elections can be understood in terms of economic conditions. But when party positions converge, the quality of economic information declines. Incumbents can thus improve their chances of avoiding blame for a poor economy—or of claiming credit for a good one—by adjusting positions in policy space. Analyses of party positions, economic conditions, and election outcomes in 17 democracies over 35 years support this prediction.
That the major parties in Australia have converged is an idea of long standing. But proponents of the idea differ about when it happened, why it happened and what its consequences might be. In revisiting the party convergence thesis, this article does three things. First, it documents the recurrent nature of this thesis and its varying terms, arguing that claims of convergence: focus on some criteria while ignoring others; confuse movements in policy space with changes in party distance; and involve an implicit essentialism, so that any two parties that share an ideology are assumed to share policy positions that can be derived from that ideology. Second, it reviews studies of election speeches since the war, and studies of government expenditure patterns and tax schedules from Whitlam to Hawke, which cast doubt on, or heavily qualify, the idea that the parties have converged or lost their traditional distinctiveness. Third, it shows that on these matters the views of voters are closer to those of the policy analysts than to those of the pundits. Survey respondents continue to distinguish between the parties on particular policies and in Left–Right terms, they care who wins, and they think the party that wins matters.
Bargaining theory predicts that as a political system’s polarization increases, parties have fewer opportunities to form coalitions without resorting to elections, inducing constraints on the management of political crises. This study tests the hypothesis that political polarization has a positive effect on cabinet duration, and draws on Social Networks Analysis to conceptualize and measure political polarization. Combining information about party ideology, inter-party distances and party size, this polarization index measures the structure of political systems in terms of possible and actual coalitions, and identifies proto-coalitions ex ante. The propositions regarding the effect of the bargaining environment on cabinet survival are tested with data covering sixteen European states in 1945–99, and are fairly robustly supported. The measure of political polarization outperforms alternative measures of this concept.
This article investigates the electoral effect of party policy shifts. I argue that whether party policy shifts are damaging or rewarding depends on whether the shift occurs in the pragmatic or principled issue domain. On pragmatic issues, voters value “getting things done.” Policy shifts in this domain signal responsiveness to the changing environment and are likely to be rewarded. Principled issues, however, concern core beliefs and values. Any policy shift in this domain is a sign of inconsistency and lack of credibility, which is likely to lead to voter withdrawal. These arguments are supported by evidence from 23 advanced democracies over a period of 40 years.
Do “niche” parties—such as Communist, Green, and extreme nationalist parties—adjust their policies in response to shifts in public opinion? Would such policy responsiveness enhance these parties' electoral support? We report the results of statistical analyses of the relationship between parties' policy positions, voters' policy preferences, and election outcomes in eight Western European democracies from 1976 to 1998 that suggest that the answer to both questions isno. Specifically, we find no evidence that niche parties responded to shifts in public opinion, while mainstream parties displayed consistent tendencies to respond to public opinion shifts. Furthermore, we find that in situations where niche parties moderated their policy positions they were systematically punished at the polls (a result consistent with the hypothesis that such parties represent extreme or noncentrist ideological clienteles), while mainstream parties did not pay similar electoral penalties. Our findings have important implications for political representation, for spatial models of elections, and for political parties' election strategies.
This article examines the measurement quality of the three main approaches to estimating policy positions of parties: expert surveys, the conventional content analysis of election programs by the Manifesto Research Group/Comparative Manifestos Project, and computer-assisted content analysis of election programs. Based on a literature review in tabular form containing quotations ordered according to major measurement problems, this contribution discusses the merits and shortcomings of the three approaches. The systematic comparison shows that all three approaches have their particular strengths and weaknesses. As a rule, the strength of one approach is the weakness of the others and vice versa. Therefore, the three approaches are not opposed to one another but complementary, so that all three are necessary for future research.
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 of cross-national, time-series data on party policy positions comes from the human interpretative coding of party manifestos by the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP). Despite widespread use of these data, the uncertainty associated with each point estimate has never been available, undermining the value of the dataset as a scientific resource. We propose a remedy. First, we characterize processes by which CMP data are generated. These include inherently stochastic processes of text authorship, as well as of the parsing and coding of observed text by humans. Second, we simulate these error-generating processes by bootstrapping analyses of coded quasi-sentences. This allows us to estimate precise levels of nonsystematic error for every category and scale reported by the CMP for its entire set of 3,000-plus manifestos. Using our estimates of these errors, we show how to correct biased inferences, in recent prominently published work, derived from statistical analyses of error-contaminated CMP data.
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