Voter ideology in western democracies, 1946–1989

Abstract

We propose a measure of voter ideology which combines party manifesto data compiled by Budge, Robertson, Heari, Klingemann, and Volkens (1992) and updated by Volkens (1995), with election return data. Assuming the comparability and relevance of leftright ideology, we estimate the median voter position in 15 Western democracies throughout most of the postwar period. The plausibility of our assumptions, and therefore the validity of our measure, is supported by the results of several validity tests. With this new measure we are able to make cross-national comparisons of voter ideology among these countries as well as cross-time comparisons within individual countries. We discuss the potential application of our measure to various debates in political science.

The Formation of Oversized Coalitions in Parliamentary Democracies

“…For many of the theories, doing so requires the ability to locate parties' positions (and sometimes status quo positions) within a common policy space. Both expert surveys (see Castles and Mair [1984] for a systematic analysis) and party manifestos data (see, for example, Kim and Fording 1998) have been used for this purpose previously. Consistent with recent research on coalition formation in parliamentary democracies (Martin and Stevenson 2001), we use Gabel and Huber's (2000) principal components approach to place all political parties studied through manifestos data over time on a common unidimensional left-right scale.…”

Voter ideology in Western democracies: An update

“…In our earlier article published in this journal, we developed measures that allow meaningful comparisons of party and voter ideology across different countries as well as across different time periods (Kim & Fording 1998). Although we developed measures of party and voter ideology, our emphasis was primarily on voter ideology.…”

The Political Consequences of Terrorism: Terror Events, Casualties, and Government Duration

“… While some have questioned whether the manifestos data can accurately measure partisanship (Harmel, Janda and Tan ; Laver and Garry ), there is evidence to suggest that the data still provide reasonable estimations of party positions (Kim and Fording ; Gabel and Huber ). Ultimately, the CMP is the most appropriate data set for our purposes given that it is the only time series data set on ideological positions for our sample countries for the time under examination. …”