Voter ideology in Western democracies: An update

Abstract

In this article, we update and expand the measure of voter ideology we originally proposed in this journal in 1998. Our new measure combines party manifesto data most recently updated by Budge et al. (2001) with election return data. Assuming the comparability and relevance of left-right ideology, we estimate the median voter position in 25 Western democracies throughout most of the postwar period. With this measure, we are able to make cross-national comparisons of voter ideology among these countries, as well as cross-time comparisons within individual countries.

Towards the median economic crisis voter? The new leftist economic agenda of the Front National in France

“…For each election year, the position of the median economic voter is computed using the methodology introduced by Kim and Fording (1998) in relation with the CMP data. This position is obtained from vote shares for ideologically ranked parties on the aforementioned economic policy scale (p.79).…”

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.…”

Differential Responsiveness in Europe: The Effects of Preference Difference and Electoral Participation

“…To measure the left-right placement of political parties, the coding of party manifesto data was used; negative scores are associated with more left-wing parties, whereas positive scores indicate more right-wing parties. Since many of the included governments are coalitions, we weighted the manifesto ideology score according to their number of seats in parliament (using data from 'parlgov' 8 ) (see also Kim and Fording 2003). Our measure is summarised in equation 4:…”