Analyzing Manifestos in their Electoral Context: A New Approach Applied to Austria, 2002–2008

Author(s)
Martin Dolezal, Laurenz Ennser-Jedenastik, Wolfgang Claudius Müller, Anna Katharina Winkler
Abstract

We present a new method to analyze party manifestos to benefit the placement of political parties per se and to advance the study of elections. Our method improves on existing manual coding approaches by (1) generating semantically complete units based on syntax, (2) standardizing units into a subject–predicate–object structure, and (3) employing a fine-grained and flexible hierarchical coding scheme. We evaluate our approach by comparing estimates for the 2002, 2006, and 2008 Austrian national elections with those yielded by previous studies that employ the entire range of available measurement strategies. We also demonstrate how we link our new manifesto data with other kind of data produced in theAustrian National Election Study, especially mass and elite (party candidate) surveys.

Organisation(s)
Department of Government
Journal
Political Science Research and Methods
Volume
4
Pages
641-650
No. of pages
10
ISSN
2049-8470
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2015.38
Publication date
09-2016
Peer reviewed
Yes
Austrian Fields of Science 2012
506014 Comparative politics
Keywords
Portal url
https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/en/publications/analyzing-manifestos-in-their-electoral-context-a-new-approach-applied-to-austria-20022008(9c47ccf7-87aa-40a5-98e9-495c8086793c).html