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Using Manifesto Estimates to Validate Computerized Analyses
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.
... Semi-automated CATA is a tried and tested method of evaluating a priori assumptions about policy, political commentary, political behaviour and many other applications. (See, inter alia, Bara 2001aBara , 2001bBara , 2006Garry 1998, 1999;Benoit and Laver, 2006.) In the case of this study, it also allows us to integrate and test further assertions made by previous analysts of abortion debates (e.g. ...
... Semi-automated CATA is a tried and tested method of evaluating a priori assumptions about policy, political commentary, political behaviour and many other applications. (See, inter alia, Bara 2001aBara , 2001bBara , 2006Garry 1998, 1999;Benoit and Laver, 2006.) In the case of this study, it also allows us to integrate and test further assertions made by previous analysts of abortion debates (e.g. ...
The analysis of parliamentary debates is at the confluence of a number of developments in political science. What light can automated and semi-automated techniques throw on such analysis? In this paper we compare two such approaches, one semi-automated (Hamlet) and the other fully automated (Alceste). We use both approaches to identify the prominent themes in debate and to assess how far speakers who favour different positions adopt a distinct pattern of discourse. We seek to assess how far the two approaches yield convergent or divergent analyses. Selecting a second reading debate from the UK House of Commons on a private member's bill on abortion in July 1966, we are able to show similarities of analysis despite the detailed differences between the two approaches. In particular, the analysis in Hamlet al.lows identification of the extent to which individual speakers employ one type of vocabulary rather than another. Alceste is able to provide a statistical basis for the different classes of vocabulary that occur in the debate. However, the two programs rest upon quite different assumptions about the relationship between syntax and meaning, with implications for the practice of political science.
It is commonplace to see references to parties’ manifestos as their written issue “profiles,” and changes in such documents as constituting changes in the parties’ “images” or “identities,” with the latter terms often used interchangeably to capture the role of platforms. This article argues, however, that projection of a party’s “image” and its “identity” are two different functions for a manifesto, not just one, and that it is important for the building and testing of theory that this distinction be maintained. Parties are, after all, addressing two audiences simultaneously with one document, and the two dimensions provide two alternative objects of change which can be used strategically to please both audiences at once.
The article employs existing manifesto-based measures of parties’ relative issue emphases and their positions on a range of issues as indicators of image and identity, respectively, and finds that the two are indeed empirically distinct. Then, an earlier test of the electoral performance hypothesis as applied to emphasis change is replicated with data designed to capture change in issue positions. The test provides evidence for the prudence of maintaining the distinction between emphasis and position as two different dimensions of party profile change.
An influential model of deliberative democracy advances a principle of reciprocity as a norm of democratic debate on morally controversial issues. This norm is at odds with behaviour that has been observed in political campaigning and policy making where advocates of competing positions talk past one another. Does this inconsistency stem from a contrast between the normative and empirical or from not considering empirically plausible practices of democratic debate in which reciprocity might be respected? One such practice is free votes on conscience issues in the UK parliament. This article examines six second reading debates in the UK House of Commons on abortion legislation to assess whether, in favourable circumstances, political debate is consistent with reciprocity. Utilising computer-aided text analysis, via the Alceste program, it finds no gross departure from the norm of reciprocity, suitably operationalised, but neither does it find complete conformity to the norm of reciprocity. Because advocacy is an important component of political representation, deliberative norms are qualified in practice.
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.
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