Putting Parties in Their Place: Inferring Party Left-Right Ideological Positions from Party Manifestos Data

Ideology and the Growth of Government

“…prior to Thatcher) constitutes around 2/3 of the data set. Gabel and Huber (2000) argue that the MRG data accurately reflect differences and trends in ideology, and they correspond well with other data sources such as expert surveys (e.g. 15 Ideally the above theory would be best investigated empirically examining different types of spending but there are substantial definitional issues.…”

Extracting Policy Positions from Political Texts Using Words as Data

“…2 For a sample of such publications, see Adams 2001;Baron 1991Baron , 1993Blais, Blake, and Dion 1993;Gabel and Huber 2000;Kim and Fording 1998;Schofield and Parks 2000;and Warwick 1994and Warwick , 2001and Warwick , 2002 generating this mammoth data set by hand over a period of more than 20 years, it is easy to see why no other research team has been willing to go behind the very distinctive theoretical assumptions that structure the CMP coding scheme or to take on the task of checking or replicating any of the data. A second approach to text analysis replaces the handcoding of texts with computerized coding schemes.…”

Matching voters to parties: Voting advice applications and models of party choice

“…The necessary assumption of the latter method is that the party rankings are equivalent to geometrical distances. 6 VAA scores are compared with Benoit and Laver's left-right scores, but in France the economic policy scale (taxes versus spending) is used as no left-right score is available; VAA scores are compared with Hooghe et al's left-right scores, but they do not have party positions for Switzerland; VAA scores are finally compared with CMP 'vanilla' scores (Gabel and Huber, 2000), which are here calculated by running a principal components analysis on parties in all OECD member countries in elections since 1990 using Klingemann et al's (2007) dataset and extracting scores for the first dimension. The simpler, CMP-provided right-left measure (rile) was also examined; the comparison with 'vanilla' scores is shown, as these are slightly more similar to VAA scores.…”