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Introduction: Content Analysis And Political Texts
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.
... 3 Text scraped from parties' webpages and text from the two main parties' videos and the Māori Party's Facebook summary post was hand coded in Excel using the Manifesto Project methodology by the New Zealand coder for the Manifesto Project. The Manifesto Project has collected and coded election programmes from around the world, with coverage of long-established democracies extending back to the mid-1940s (Budge and Bara 2001;Budge and Meyer 2013, p. 18), and for New Zealand back to 1905 (Gibbons 2000(Gibbons , 2011. Examples of the coding categories are shown in Table 4. Sentences in the scraped texts were broken up into distinct policy ideas and each allocated one of 90 (some subcodes are used for New Zealand) different policy codes. ...
High use of social media by voters and by political parties, which is quantified by this article for the 2020 New Zealand general election, raises the question of how informative parties’ social media posts are compared to other policy statements. Text scraped from Facebook posts and from the two main parties’ video advertisements was coded using the Manifesto Project’s methodology. The positions of parties on the two main dimensions of political competition were broadly similar using social media text and text from manifestos, webpages and opening campaign speeches. However, parties were sometimes more focussed on their core topics on social media than in longer documents, which may make it easier for voters to understand their key priorities. The results also show that coding social media data using the Manifesto Project’s methods produces better data about parties’ policies than the broader Campaign for Strasbourg (CamforS) categories previously used for New Zealand and many other countries.
... Following Klu¨ver (2009), the dependent variable is validated through correlation with hand-coded scores following the Comparative Manifestos Project procedure (Budge and Bara, 2001;Klingemann et al., 2006). Fifteen codes are used, consisting of seven 'pro EU asylum security' codes, and seven 'anti EU asylum security' codes, and one for 'other' (Table 1). ...
This study examines speeches in the European Parliament relating to asylum. Conceptually, it tests hypotheses concerning the relation between national parties and Members of European Parliament. The computer-based content analysis method Wordfish is used to examine 876 speeches from 2004 to 2014, scaling Members of European Parliament along a unidimensional policy space. Debates on asylum predominantly concern positions for or against European Union security measures. Surprisingly, national party preferences for European Union integration were not the dominant factor. The strongest predictors of Members of European Parliament's positions are their national parties’ general ‘right-left’ preferences, and duration of European Union membership. Generally, Members of European Parliament from Central and Eastern Europe and the European People's Party take up pro-security stances. Wordfish was effective and valid, confirming the relevance of automated content analysis for studying the European Union.
... Notwithstanding which definition of measurement is chosen, this element of methodology is the linking component between theory and data (concepts and real world) in any social research project. Hypothesis testing in quantitative social research 6 design usually begins with the formulation of hypotheses according to some theory 7 . This involves conceptualisation of the hypotheses, or "process of specifying the vague mental imagery of our concepts, sorting out the kinds of observations and measurements that will be appropriate for our research" (Babbie, 1989, p. 126). ...
... However, the MRG technique is not the most appropriate for testing Kitschelt's model. To code manifestos, the MRG has chosen a saliency (or valence) approach, assuming that 'parties argue with each other by emphasizing different policy priorities rather than by directly confronting each other on the same issues' (Budge and Bara, 2001: 6–7). In other words, the MRG believes that issues are salient in nature, i.e. parties pay attention to some issues and neglect others, regardless of their positions on these issues. ...
In an updated version of his well-known work on the radical right, Kitschelt attributes the persistent success of this type of party to a new winning formula. Where the radical right first campaigned on a neoliberal and authoritarian programme, it now presents a more centrist economic position. The article tests this idea through a reconstruction of the positions of the French Front National, the Flemish Vlaams Blok and the Dutch Lijst Pim Fortuyn, and establishes that some, but not all, radical right parties make use of the new winning formula. Moreover, innovative analysis of the positions of radical right parties in West European party systems reveals that Kitschelt's theory needs to be improved on several points, most notably when it comes to the definition of concepts and the operationalization of dimensions.
... Great strides have been made by testing, challenging, expanding, adapting, and improving the Comparative Manifestos Project coding method, for instance (Volkens, 2001). Rather, building on tested techniques allows content analysts to elude many pitfalls encountered during earlier studies, and avoid a state of methodological anarchism (Budge and Bara, 2001). ...
... This article makes use of a Voter-Based Policy Mapping (VPM) approach to study how policy orientations affect the formation of coalitions. It enables the researcher to investigate the importance of policies even though more traditional party policy data do not exist in this context, such as expert surveys (e.g., Huber and Inglehart, 1995), surveys among politicians (e.g., Mair, 2001) or textual analysis of party declarations (Budge and Bara 2001). ...
Although previous research has suggested that the opposition’s ability to form pre-electoral coalitions (PECs) in authoritarian elections is crucial for the electoral outcome, little has been written about why and when such coalitions are formed. The aim of this article is to fill this empirical and theoretical gap. A theory that combines oppositional parties’ office- and policy-gaining potential when creating such coalitions is proposed. The article utilizes a unique database of 111 competitive authoritarian elections and provides a representative sample of strategically chosen cases. It is shown that, coalitions are more likely when structural conditions favor oppositional victories and when oppositional parties have a distinctive policy agenda in relation to the incumbent government. These factors are shown to be more important than electoral institutions.
This dissertation provides an empirical, systematic and detailed analysis of programmatic change in European radical left parties (RLPs) since the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989). In particular, it seeks to understand the programmatic development of the party family since this important critical juncture and the factors that have driven changes in their policy platforms since then. In short, it addresses the question of how and why RLPs have changed programmatically over the past three decades.
Nationalism has experienced a resurgence across Europe since 1980, and one common explanation for this resurgence is that the backlash to European integration aids radical right parties, which prioritise cultural protectionism in the form of anti-immigration and anti-ethnic minority appeals. In contrast, this article argues that, through the policy-making avenues available to certain parties, but not others, European integration encourages a different form of nationalism in highly regionalised countries: ethnoregionalism, which seeks either greater autonomy or independence for a sub-national unit. By examining how nationalist parties combine both cultural protectionism and ethnoregionalism, and the relative saliency that they attach to each, this article provides a novel way to disentangle the EU’s different potential effects on nationalism. Through a quantitative analysis of party manifestos across 33 European countries for 1980–2019, this article finds that European integration has a significantly stronger effect on the saliency of ethnoregionalism than cultural protectionism.
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: [DOI].
Under successive New Labour administrations British law and order policy experienced a significant shift. The literature, however, falls short to empirically substantiate whether this change can be attributed to the ideological preferences of the party in power – neither on the aggregate-level nor in terms of a causal mechanism. This study develops a novel partisan effects mechanism linking the notion of policy-seeking party elites with the notion of policy entrepreneurship. The applied mixed-method research design confirms a partisan link in two ways: On the aggregate-level, the first systematic analysis of the complete law and order legislation from 1990 to 2014 allows to assess the significant policy change as well as its correlation with partisan effects. On the micro-level, a qualitative analysis traces these effects within the political process of a single piece of legislation highlighting policy entrepreneurs as a causal mechanism of partisan effects.
We analyse if media coverage of social justice issues affects whether political party manifestos deal with social justice or whether political party manifestos conversely influence how much media reports about social justice issues. To understand whether the media influence politics or whether politics conversely influences media coverage, we use a quantitative content analysis of all articles that appeared in Die Zeit, Der Spiegel and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung since 1946, together with data from the Party Manifesto Project. Our results show that news coverage of social justice influences what percentage of party manifestos is devoted to the topic of social justice, independently of actual income inequality. We find little indication of the contrary link, which is that party manifestos influence media coverage on social justice issues. Thus, our findings show that the news media set the agenda of political parties, independently of real-world indicators.
While the questions of how parties seek to address (or not) pressing issues are critically important, scholars have generally paid little attention to where issues are addressed within the political system, and the consequences for party competition of that choice. The fact that issues can be addressed within several institutional (i.e. functional) domains and levels – general elections, parliament, referenda, courts, local government, etc. – implies that political parties may address an issue, and thereby interact with one another, in consequentially different ways depending on the institutional arena or level of government wherein they seek resolution. This article describes how Ireland’s parties addressed the electorally volatile issue of abortion via referendum campaigns. The article draws upon multiple sources of evidence to support its findings, including original data based on results from the author’s two parliamentary surveys following the 2007 and 2011 election campaigns.
In 1991 Taiwan held its first fully democratic election. This first single volume of party politics in Taiwan analyzes the evolution of party competition in the country, looking at how Taiwan's parties have adjusted to their new multi-party election environment. It features key chapters on: the development of party politics in Taiwan. the impact of party change on social welfare, corruption and national identity. party politics in the DPP era. Including interviews with high-ranking Taiwanese politicians and material on the 2004 Presidential election, this important work brings the literature up-to-date. It provides a valuable resource for scholars of Chinese and Taiwanese politics and a welcome addition to the field of regime transition and democratization.
The RILE index of the manifesto dataset is a popular but controversial estimate of parties’ left–right positions. It has been thoroughly criticized, yet a basic question of its validity has not been addressed. In the current article I argue that for the index to be valid, patterns of association presumed by the logic of the index must be present in the data used to calculate it. I apply canonical correlation analysis (CCA) to test these associations within and between the sets of variables that form the left–right (RILE) index, concluding that for countries which have not experienced a communist past the relationship is present, although substantively weak. More important, however, is that for post-communist countries the required associations in the data are clearly not there. The RILE index is therefore an invalid measure of left–right position for this set of countries.
En los regímenes democráticos, los partidos políticos son imprescindibles para la relación entre los ciudadanos y las decisiones colectivas. Las teorías más influyentes sobre los partidos han restado importancia a su función mediadora en América Latina, al caracterizarlos como clientelistas, personalistas y/o no programáticos. Sin embargo, en los últimos años varios trabajos han mostrado que aún en la región los partidos políticos son capaces de proveer a la ciudadanía, con matices, vínculos programáticos y hasta congruencia ideológica. Teniendo en cuenta que las plataformas electorales son una dimensión importante de las definiciones programáticas de los partidos, el artículo analiza las plataformas electorales de los partidos más relevantes para las elecciones presidenciales en Argentina entre 1983 y 2011, utilizando la metodología provista por el Comparative Manifestos Project para analizar su contenido temático a través del tiempo.
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.
The analysis of interest group influence is crucial in order to explain policy outcomes and to assess the democratic legitimacy of the European Union. However, owing to methodological difficulties in operationalizing influence, only few have studied it. This article therefore proposes a new approach to the measurement of influence, drawing on quantitative text analysis. By comparing interest groups’ policy positions with the final policy output, one can draw conclusions about the winners and losers of the decision-making process. In order to examine the applicability of text analysis, a case study is presented comparing hand-coding, WORDSCORES and Wordfish. The results correlate highly and text analysis proves to be a powerful tool to measure interest groups’ policy positions, paving the way for the large-scale analysis of interest group influence.
The European Commission considers interest group inclusion as a means to increase the democratic legitimacy of the European Union (EU). As part of the strategy for better governance, the Commission has taken various measures in order to increase civil society participation. Whether these measures truly enhance the democratic legitimacy however crucially depends on the distribution of influence among interest groups. This article therefore analyzes the distribution of influence based on a quantitative content analysis of submissions in the Commission's online consultations. This makes it possible to identify the policy positions of interest groups and to compare them with the final policy output thus drawing conclusions about the winners and losers of the decision-making process. In order to examine the applicability of text analysis to the study of interest group influence, a case study will be carried out comparing different types of text analysis from conventional hand-coding to the latest quantitative approaches WORDSCORES and Wordfish.
The present study proposes a discourse-immanent view (following Wodak 2001) of political manifestos, examining them as sites for textually negotiating tensions and paradoxes, rather than focusing on their persuasive aspects. This approach is applied to the analysis of two founding documents of the Israeli religious settlers' movement, where tensions between religious vision and actual politics have increased over time. Findings indicate that in the first manifesto (1974), discursive resources (temporality, point of view construction and terms of reference) are strategically used to contain tensions and maintain the movement's dialectical vision of the relations between religion and politics. By contrast, the second manifesto (1980) exhibits simpler textual patterns which forgo this dialectical commitment, reflecting the eroding ability to textually reconcile ideological tensions as challenges to the movement's vision grow. This is discussed as demonstrating the utility of discourse analysis for historical research in providing micro-evidence for the emergence of ideological change.
The dataset of the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) is one the best known and often used datasets in comparative studies of Western Europe. However, the Danish part of the data is very problematic. On average, nearly a third of the content of the Danish manifestos is deemed impossible to code. A close examination of the Danish data reveals large variations in the number of coded sentences across time and parties. An analysis of the manifestos on which the coding is based sets all the warning lights flashing. First, not all manifestos are in fact manifestos; a number consist of other political texts (i.e. speeches, drafts) or even stem from different elections (e.g. municipal manifestos masquerading as national manifestos). Second, the large variation in the length of the manifestos across time suggests that the information derived from them is not readily comparable. This leads to a distorted picture of the positions of the Danish parties. The conclusion of this article is that in order for the Danish part of the CMP dataset to become more trustworthy, it is necessary to search the archives, find the actual manifestos and recode them.
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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