Left–Right Political Scales: Some ‘Expert’ Judgments

Castles, Francis G.; Mair, Peter

doi:10.1111/j.1475-6765.1984.tb00080.x

Cited by 787 publications

(341 citation statements)

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“…Several pitfalls are associated with measuring party ideology, as outlined in Castles and Mair's (1984) pioneering paper. Measuring party ideology consistently across time and space involves assessing the dimensionality of ideology, choosing a scale of ideology common to all units of observation, and in most cases making the implicit or explicit assumption that ideology is scale-invariant across time.…”

Section: Measuring Party Ideology Across the Us Statesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The size and scope of government in the US states: does party ideology matter?

Bjørnskov

Potrafke

2013

Int Tax Public Finance

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. (2011) that considers spatial and temporal differences in Democratic and Republican Party ideology. We distinguish between three types of divided government: overall divided government, proposal division and approval division. The main result suggests that Republican governors have been more active in deregulating labor markets. We find that ideologyinduced policies were counteracted under overall divided government and proposal division. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor mayJEL Code: D72, H70, O51.

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Section: Measuring Party Ideology Across the Us Statesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The size and scope of government in the US states: does party ideology matter?

Bjørnskov

Potrafke

2013

Int Tax Public Finance

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“…1 and 2 of Budge and Pennings, 2007) but Table 1 (also in Budge and Pennings, 2007) on 'forwards' and 'backwards' estimates which conflict. Incidentally, these are more severe when we use Castles and Mair's (1984) expert scores than when we use the Manifesto scores. It seems that convergence cannot be guaranteed between the estimates made on different bases.…”

Section: The General Instability Of Word Frequency Estimatesmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…We could have arrived at the essentially contested nature of word frequency estimates simply on the basis of the expert scores (Castles and Mair, 1984) and general judgements of party specialists about British and American party movements. The Manifesto estimates refine these but also conform to them (Budge et al, 2001, 24e26).…”

Section: Methodological Aspects Of the Manifesto (Mrg/cmp) Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

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Missing the message and shooting the messenger: Benoit and Laver's ‘response’

Budge¹,

Pennings²

2007

Electoral Studies

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Benoit and Laver (BL; 2007-a-b) ignore the main point made in our article (Budge and Pennings, 2007), about the unreliability of policy estimates made by word frequency methods in the absence of authoritative 'calibrating' texts. Instead they concentrate on the general unreliability of the MRG/CMP Manifesto data (Budge et al., 2001) as a 'benchmark', in spite of the fact that we also used expert scores (Castles and Mair, 1984). Accordingly we divide this reply into two parts. The first deals with questions BL avoid but which provide a context for their criticism of aggregated reference documents. The second responds directly to their datacritiques, showing that they are mostly partial and misleading.1. The general instability of word frequency estimates BL (p. 1) characterize our article as 'criticizing the 'Wordscores' method for computerized content analysis .'. Actually it does not. 'Wordscores' is a useful computer programme 1 which operationalizes a particular approach within the range of possible word frequency techniques. But it is not the only approach. Indeed 'Wordscores' was clearly conceived within the conceptual framework of calibrating and application documents and word weightings provided by Pennings (1999, 2001) and described at the outset of our article. The Laver team abandoned an earlier and cruder approach to computerized analysis (Laver and Garry, 2000) in favour of simplifying and operationalizing this word frequency one. 2 So we have at least two extant applications of word frequency analysis to political texts. 3 The fact that we began with, and returned to, Kleinnijenhuis and Pennings's work at various points demonstrates our general concern with word frequency analysis as an approach rather than Wordscores as such. A check against the Manifesto Left-Right series was Kleinnijenhuis and Pennings's preferred test for their own word-frequency approach. So it was natural Ã Corresponding author. Fax: þ33 20 5986820.E-mail address: pjm.pennings@fsw.vu.nl (P. Pennings). 1 Indeed as we made heavy use of it to support our points about the word frequency approach, we ought to commend the speed with which its authors have made it generally available and in particular Ken Benoit's role in supporting and disseminating it among the professional community.2 Laver et al. (2003, 312) list Kleinnijenhuis and Pennings's article among earlier and quite disparate computerized content analyses but do not refer to it otherwise, or in their response, in spite of its prominence in our discussion.3 Word frequency approaches antedate both sets of authors of course. For example, a project in the Edinburgh Faculty of Divinity in the mid-1950s tried to establish the exact authorship of St Paul's Epistles through word counts. It stopped after concluding they could not all have been written by the same person but could not decide where St Paul was author because they lacked an authoritative reference text indubitably by him. This is the general problem we identify for word-frequency policy estimates.0261-3794/$ -se...

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“…Notably, Huber et al find that Christian democratic parties drive spending, but Hicks and Misra find no robustly positive effect of "center" parties. Moreover, Hicks and Castles and Mair 1984) behind the labeling of partisan political parties. Why findings on labor strikes are so divergent is less clear, though protest of all kinds may have greater impacts in noncorporatist political systems or in periods of economic decline, as suggested by Hicks and Misra.…”

Section: The Findingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The State of the Art in Welfare State Research on Social Spending Efforts in Capitalist Democracies Since 1960

Amenta¹

1993

American Journal of Sociology

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In the last generation, social scientists have made great advances in understanding the forces behind the welfare state-or public social spending and provision. Scholars have asked why those aided by the state get what they do in the ways that they do for a number of circumstances affecting income and life chances. Typically, the object of study has been the state's efforts through spending or services to ameliorate routine and foreseeable predicaments that threaten income, such as those caused by old age, unemployment, ill health, disability, and industrial accidents. Often scholars have widened the focus to include programs aiding persons with family obligations and citizens having served in the military. Sometimes housing, nutritional, and educational needs have been included, expanding the definition of the welfare state to encompass almost all domestic public spending.Researchers have explored many empirical settings to derive and appraise arguments about public social provision. Influential early work (e.g., Marshall 1963; Titmuss 1958; Peacock and Wiseman 1961) focused on post-World War I1 Britain's adoption of comprehensive public social provision and the term the "welfare state." These studies argued that the inevitable expansion of citizen rights or, alternatively, social solidarities forged in war promoted public social provision. Soon, however, social scientists began quantitative, cross-sectional studies of all the countries of the post-World War I1 world (e.g., Cutright 1965;Wilensky 1975) and typically found that socioeconomic "modernization," notably industrialization and the aging of the population, underlay social spending progress. In addition, U.S. states were used as laboratories to test propositions about social policy-mainly whether economic modernization or ' For comments and advice, I

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Left–Right Political Scales: Some ‘Expert’ Judgments

Cited by 787 publications

References 5 publications

The size and scope of government in the US states: does party ideology matter?

The size and scope of government in the US states: does party ideology matter?

Missing the message and shooting the messenger: Benoit and Laver's ‘response’

The State of the Art in Welfare State Research on Social Spending Efforts in Capitalist Democracies Since 1960

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