Coding Procedure for Radical Right Party Lists

I obtained a party list for an election between 2005 and 2007 for radical right parties in states that require candidates for public office to list their occupations along with other personal data. The following states have such a requirement: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, France, Sweden, and Switzerland. I chose the party list that would maximize the number of observations for each radical right party. For all parties except the Belgian National Front and the Sweden Democrats, where the lists for the regional and municipal elections, respectively, contained more candidates, this was the list for the national parliamentary election. Using the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO-88), a native speaker of the relevant language assigned the corresponding numerical code to the occupation of each candidate. Separate codes were assigned to the following: students, pensioners, homemakers, self-employed (when there was no further specification), and unemployed. These categories were not included in the percentages reported in Appendix C, although they were counted toward the total number of observations.

In Austria, it was necessary to recode the large percentage of candidates who described themselves as either angestellte (employee) or beamten (civil servant). It was possible to give approximately half of these candidates more specific codings by consulting the party Web site or through a general Internet search; otherwise, such candidates were assigned the code 4.