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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 August 2015

Martin Dolezal ,
Laurenz Ennser-Jedenastik ,
Wolfgang C. Müller  and
Anna Katharina Winkler
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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.

Type
Research Notes
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 4 , Supplement 3 , September 2016 , pp. 641 - 650
Copyright
© The European Political Science Association 2015 

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Footnotes

*

Martin Dolezal, Assistant Professor (martin.dolezal@univie.ac.at); Laurenz Ennser-Jedenastik, Assistant Professor (laurenz.ennser@univie.ac.at); Wolfgang C. Müller, Professor (wolfgang.mueller@univie.ac.at) and Anna K. Winkler, Pre-doctoral Researcher, Department of Government, University of Vienna, Vienna (katharina.winkler@univie.ac.at). Research for this note was conducted under the auspices of the Austrian National Election Study (AUTNES), a National Research Network (NFN) sponsored by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) (S10903-G11). The authors gratefully acknowledge helpful comments by two reviewers and the corresponding editor, Kenneth Benoit. To view supplementary material for this article, please visit http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2015.38

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Supplementary material: Link

Dolezal et al. Dataset

Dataset

http://dx/doi.org/10.7910/DVN/27864
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Dolezal supplementary material S1

Appendix

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Appendix

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