Skip to main content

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
Cancel
×
×
Home
  • Home
Article
  • Access

Estimating Party Positions across Countries and Time—A Dynamic Latent Variable Model for Manifesto Data

  • Thomas König (a1), Moritz Marbach (a2) and Moritz Osnabrügge (a3)
Abstract

This article presents a new method for estimating positions of political parties across country- and time-specific contexts by introducing a latent variable model for manifesto data. We estimate latent positions and exploit bridge observations to make the scales comparable. We also incorporate expert survey data as prior information in the estimation process to avoid ex post facto interpretation of the latent space. To illustrate the empirical contribution of our method, we estimate the left-right positions of 388 parties competing in 238 elections across twenty-five countries and over sixty years. Compared to the puzzling volatility of existing estimates, we find that parties more modestly change their left-right positions over time. We also show that estimates without country- and time-specific bias parameters risk serious, systematic bias in about two-thirds of our data. This suggests that researchers should carefully consider the comparability of party positions across countries and/or time.

    •
      • Send article to Kindle

      To send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle.

      Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

      Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

      Estimating Party Positions across Countries and Time—A Dynamic Latent Variable Model for Manifesto Data
      Available formats
      ×
      Send article to Dropbox

      To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your <service> account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox.

      Estimating Party Positions across Countries and Time—A Dynamic Latent Variable Model for Manifesto Data
      Available formats
      ×
      Send article to Google Drive

      To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your <service> account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive.

      Estimating Party Positions across Countries and Time—A Dynamic Latent Variable Model for Manifesto Data
      Available formats
      ×
Copyright
COPYRIGHT: © The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Political Methodology 
Corresponding author
e-mail: koenig@uni-mannheim.de (corresponding author)
Footnotes
Hide All

Authors' note: For helpful comments and suggestions, we thank two anonymous reviewers, R. Michael Alvarez, Meghan Helsel, Carlo Horz, Dirk Junge, Sebastian Köhler, James Lo, Bernd Luig, Andrew D. Martin, Sven-Oliver Proksch, Zeynep Somer-Topcu, and the participants of the Finding Thetas Conference 2012 in Bern. Sophie Mathes provided excellent research assistance. All errors remain our responsibility. Replication data are available at http://hdl.handle.net/1902.1/29312 (König, Marbach, and Osnabrügge 2013). Supplementary materials for this article are available on the Political Analysis Web site.

Footnotes
References
Hide All
Adams, J., and Merrill, S. 2006. Why small, centrist third parties motivate policy divergence by major parties. American Political Science Review 100(3): 403–17.
Adams, J., Clark, M., Ezrow, L., and Glasgow, G. 2006. Are niche parties fundamentally different from mainstream parties? The causes and the electoral consequences of western European parties' policy shifts, 1976–1998. American Journal of Political Science 50: 513–29.
Adams, J., and Somer-Topcu, Z. 2009. Policy adjustment by parties in response to rival parties' policy shifts: Spatial theory and the dynamics of party competition in twenty-five post-war democracies. British Journal of Political Science 39: 825–46.
Alvarez, R., and Nagler, J. 2004. Party system compactness: Measurement and consequences. Political Analysis 12(1): 46–62.
Bailey, M. A. 2007. Comparable preference estimates across time and institutions for the court, Congress, and presidency. American Journal of Political Science 51(3): 433–48.
Bakker, R. 2009. Re-measuring left-right: A comparison of SEM and Bayesian measurement models for extracting left-right party placements. Electoral Studies 28(3): 413–21.
Bartolini, S., and Mair, P. 1990. Identity, competition, and electoral availability. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Benoit, K., and Laver, M. 2006. Party policy in modern democracies. London: Routledge.
Benoit, K., and Laver, M. 2007. Estimating party policy positions: Comparing expert surveys and hand-coded content analysis. Electoral Studies 26(1): 90–107.
Benoit, K., and Laver, M. 2012. The dimensionality of political space: Epistemological and methodological considerations. European Union Politics 13(2): 194–218.
Benoit, K., Laver, M., and Mikhaylov, S. 2009. Treating words as data with error: Uncertainty in text statements of policy positions. American Journal of Political Science 53(2): 495–513.
Benoit, K., Laver, M., Lowe, W., and Mikhaylov, S. 2012. How to scale coded text units without bias: A response to Gemenis. Electoral Studies 31: 605–8.
Bernhardt, M., and Ingberman, D. 1985. Candidate reputations and the “incumbency effect”. Journal of Public Economics 27(1): 47–67.
Blais, A., Blake, D., and Dion, S. 1993. Do parties make a difference? Parties and the size of government in liberal democracies. American Journal of Political Science 37(1): 40–62.
Borella, F. 1990. Les Partis Politique Dans La France d'Aujord'hui. Paris: Seuil.
Braun, D., Salzwedel, M., Stumpf, C., and Wüst, A. 2004. Euromanifesto Documentation.
Budge, I. 1994. A new spatial theory of party competition: Uncertainty, ideology and policy equilibria viewed comparatively and temporally. British Journal of Political Science 24(4): 443–67.
Budge, I., Klingemann, H.-D., Volkens, A., Bara, J., and Tanenbaum, E. 2001. Mapping policy preferences: Estimates for parties, electors, and governments 1945–1998. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Canes-Wrone, B., and Park, J.-K. 2012. Electoral business cycles in OECD countries. American Political Science Review 106(1): 103–22.
Corbett, R. 1998. The European parliaments role in closer EU integration. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Press.
Dinas, E., and Gemenis, K. 2010. Measuring parties' ideological positions with manifesto data: A critical evaluation of the competing methods. Party Politics 16(4): 427–50.
Döring, H., and Manow, P. 2012. Parliament and Government Composition Database (ParlGov): An infrastructure for empirical information on parties, elections and governments in modern democracies. Version 12/10.
Elff, M. 2013. A dynamic state-space model of coded political texts. Political Analysis 21(2): 217–32.
Enelow, J., and Munger, M. 1993. The elements of candidate reputation: The effect of record and credibility on optimal spatial location. Public Choice 77: 757–72.
Ezrow, L. 2008. Parties' policy programmes and the dog that didn't bark: No evidence that proportional systems promote extreme party positioning. British Journal of Political Science 38(3): 479–97.
Foldal, D. 1989. Sweden. In Western European political parties: A comprehensive guide, ed. Jacobs, F., 618–35. Harlow, UK: Longman.
Franzmann, S., and Kaiser, A. 2006. Locating political parties in policy space. Party Politics 12(2): 163–88.
Gabel, M. J., and Huber, J. D. 2000. Putting parties in their place: Inferring party left-right ideological positions from party manifestos data. American Journal of Political Science 44(1): 94–103.
Gelman, A., and Rubin, D. B. 1992. Inference from iterative simulation using multiple sequences. Statistical Science 7(4): 457–72.
Gelman, A., and Hill, J. 2007. Data analysis using regression and multilevel/hierarchical models. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Gemenis, K. 2012. What to do (and not to do) with the comparative manifesto project data. Political Studies 61 (S1): 3–23.
Glasgow, G. 2001. Mixed logit models for multiparty elections. Political Analysis 9(2): 116–36.
Golder, S. N. 2006. Pre-electoral coalition formation in parliamentary democracies. British Journal of Political Science 36: 193–212.
Grimmer, J., and Stewart, B. M. 2013. Text as data: The promise and pitfalls of automatic content analysis methods for political texts. Political Analysis published online (doi:10.1093/pan/mps028).
Groseclose, T., Levitt, S. D., and Snyder, J. M. 1999. Comparing interest group scores across time and chambers: Adjusted ADA scores for the U.S. Congress. American Political Science Review 93(1): 33–50.
Gschwend, T., Lo, J., and Proksch, S. O. 2012. Europe's common ideological space. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago.
Hanley, D. 1999. France: Living with instability. In Changing party systems in Western Europe, eds. Broughton, D. and Donovan, M., 48–70. London: Pinter.
Ho, D. E., and Quinn, K. M. 2008. Measuring explicit political positions of media. Quarterly Journal of Political Science 3(4): 353–77.
Hooghe, L., Bakker, R., Brigevich, A., De Vries, C., Edwards, E., Marks, G., Rovny, J., Steenbergen, M., and Vachudova, M. 2010. Reliability and validity of the 2002 and 2006 Chapel Hill expert surveys on party positioning. European Journal of Political Research 49: 687–703.
Hunt, B., and Laver, M. 1992. Party and policy competition. New York: Routledge.
Ingberman, D. 1989. Reputational dynamics in spatial competition. Mathematical and Computer Modelling 12(4): 479–96.
Jackman, S. 2009. Bayesian analysis for the social sciences. New York: Wiley.
Jahn, D. 2009. Das politische System Schwedens. In Die politischen Systeme Westeuropas, ed. Ismayr, W., 107–50. Wiesbaden, Germany: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.
Kedar, O. 2005. How diffusion of power in parliaments affects voter choice. Political Analysis 13(4): 410–29.
Kim, H., and Fording, R. C. 2002. Government partisanship in western democracies, 1945–1998. European Journal of Political Research 41(2): 187–206.
Klingemann, H.-D., and Volkens, A. 2007. Mapping policy preferences II: Estimates for parties, electors and governments in Central and Eastern Europe, European Union and OECD 1990–2003. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Knapp, A., and Wright, V. 2006. The government and politics of France. New York: Routledge.
König, T., and Luig, B. 2012. Party ideology and legislative agendas: Estimating contextual policy positions for the study of EU decision-making. European Union Politics 13: 604–25.
König, T., Marbach, M., and Osnabrügge, M. 2013. Replication data for: Estimating party positions across countries and time—a dynamic latent variable model for manifesto data. http://hdl.handle.net/1902.1/29312 (accessed February 28, 2013) IQSS Dataverse Network.
Laver, M., and Budge, I. 1992. Party policy and government coalitions. Houndmills, UK: Macmillan.
Laver, M., Benoit, K., and Garry, J. 2003. Extracting policy positions from political texts using words as data. American Political Science Review 97(2): 311–31.
Lewis, J., and King, G. 1999. No evidence on directional vs. proximity voting. Political Analysis 8(1): 21–33.
Lipset, S. M., and Rokkan, S. 1967. Cleavage structures, party systems and voter alignments. In Party systems and voter alignments: Cross-national perspectives, eds. Lipset, S. M. and Rokkan, S., 1–64. New York: Free Press.
Lowe, D. 1989. France. In Western European political parties, ed. Jacobs, F., 79–118. Essex, UK: Longman.
Lowe, W., and Benoit, K. Forthcoming 2013. Validating estimates of latent traits from textual data using human judgement as a benchmark. Political Analysis.
Lowe, W., Benoit, K., Mikhaylov, S., and Laver, M. 2011. Scaling policy preferences from coded political texts. Legislative Studies Quarterly 36(1): 123–55.
Mair, P. 1999. Party system change: Approaches and interpretations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mair, P. 2001. The freezing hypothesis: An evaluation. In Party systems and voter alignments revisited, eds. Karvonen, L. and Kuhnle, S., 24–41. London: Routledge.
Maoz, Z., and Somer-Topcu, Z. 2010. Political polarization and cabinet stability in multiparty systems: A social networks analysis of European parliaments, 1945–98. British Journal of Political Science 40: 805–33.
Martin, A. D., and Quinn, K. M. 2002. Dynamic ideal point estimation via Markov chain Monte Carlo for the U.S. Supreme Court, 1953–1999. Political Analysis 10(2): 134–53.
Martin, L. W., and Stevenson, R. T. 2001. Government formation in parliamentary democracies. American Journal of Political Science 45(1): 33–50.
McDonald, M. D., and Mendes, S. M. 2001. The policy space of party manifestos. In Estimating the policy positions of political actors, ed. Laver, M., 90–114. New York: Routlegde.
McDonald, M. D., Mendes, S. M., and Kim, M. 2007. Cross-temporal and cross-national comparisons of party left-right positions. Electoral Studies 26(1): 62–75.
Mikhaylov, S., Laver, M., and Benoit, K. 2012. Coder reliability and misclassification in the human coding of party manifestos. Political Analysis 20(1): 78–91.
Milner, H. V., and Judkins, B. 2004. Partisanship, trade policy, and globalization: Is there a left-right divide on trade policy? International Studies Quarterly 48(1): 95–119.
Nowak, M., and Sigmund, K. 1993. A strategy for win-stay, lose-shift that outperforms tit-for-tat in the prisoner's dilemma. Nature 364(56): 56–58.
Pierson, P. 2000. Increasing returns, path dependence, and the study of politics. American Political Science Review 94(2): 251–67.
Plummer, M. 2003. JAGS: a program for analysis of Bayesian graphical models using Gibbs sampling. Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Distributed Statistical Computing.
Poole, K. T., and Rosenthal, H. 1985. A spatial model for legislative roll call analysis. American Journal of Political Science 29(2): 357–84.
Powell, B. G. 2009. The ideological congruence controversy. Comparative Political Studies 42: 1475–97.
Quinn, K. M. 2004. Bayesian factor analysis for mixed ordinal and continuous responses. Political Analysis 12(4): 338–53.
R Core Team. 2012. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Vienna, Austria. http://www.R-project.org/.
Sartori, G. 1976. Parties and party systems. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Schmitt, H., Evi, S., Leim, I., and Moschner, M. 2008. The Mannheim eurobarometer trendfile. European Commission [Principal investigator]. GESIS Data Archive, Cologne. ZA3521 Data file Version 2.0.1.
Shor, B., and McCarty, N. 2011. The ideological mapping of American legislatures. American Political Science Review 105: 530–51.
Slapin, J. B., and Proksch, S.-O. 2008. A scaling model for estimating time-series party positions from texts. American Journal of Political Science 52: 705–22.
Somer-Topcu, Z. 2009. Timely decisions: The effects of past national elections on party policy change. Journal of Politics 71(1): 238–48.
Steenbergen, M. R., and Marks, G. 2007. Evaluating expert surveys. European Journal of Political Research 46(3): 347–66.
Stoll, H. 2010. Elite-level conflict salience and dimensionality in Western Europe: Concepts and empirical findings. West European Politics 33(3): 445–73.
Tavits, M. 2007. Principle vs. pragmatism: Policy shifts and political competition. American Journal of Political Science 51(1): 151–65.
Tavits, M., and Letki, N. 2009. When left is right: Party ideology and policy in post-communist Europe. American Political Science Review 103: 555–69.
Tsebelis, G. 1999. Veto players and law production in parliamentary democracies: An empirical analysis. American Political Science Review 93: 591–608.
Tsebelis, G. 2002. Veto players: How political institutions work. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Vedung, E. 1988. The Swedish five-party syndrome and the environmentalists. In When parties refuse to fail: the case of France, eds. Merkl, P. H. and Lawson, K., 76–109. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Volkens, A., Lacewell, O., Lehmann, P., Regel, S., Schultze, H., and Werner, A. 2012. The manifesto data collection. Manifesto project (MRG/CMP/MARPOR). Berlin: Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB).
Warwick, P. V. 1998. Policy distance and parliamentary government. Legislative Studies Quarterly 23(3): 319–45.
West, M., and Harrison, J. 1997. Bayesian forecasting and dynamic models. New York: Springer.
Wüst, A. M., and Volkens, A. 2003. Euromanifesto coding instructions. MZES Working paper 64.
Recommend this journal

Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this journal to your organisation's collection.

Political Analysis
  • ISSN: 1047-1987
  • EISSN: 1476-4989
  • URL: /core/journals/political-analysis
Please enter your name
Please enter a valid email address
Who would you like to send this to? *

CAPTCHA *

Skip to the audio challenge
×
MathJax

Metrics

Altmetric attention score

Full text views

Total number of HTML views: 0
Total number of PDF views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

Abstract views

Total abstract views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between <date>. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

Usage data cannot currently be displayed

Cancel
Confirm
×