Manual Coding of Election Programs

History of Coding Election Programs

For the original MRG/CPM project, a classification scheme was designed for the coding of the content of election programs for the post World-War-II period in a variety of countries. A first version of the original classification scheme was developed by David Robertson (1976) for analysing modes of party competition in Britain. In 1979, the ‘Manifesto Research Group’ (MRG) was constituted as a research group of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) by scholars interested in a comparative content-analytic approach on policy positions of parties. During their work, the classification scheme was extended and revised to fit additional countries. Since 1989 the Social Science Research Centre Berlin (WZB) provides resources for updating and expanding the MRG data set in the context of its ‘ Comparative Manifestos Project’ (CMP).

 

The Euromanifestos Coding Scheme (EMCS)

Within the ‘Euromanifestos Project’ at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) we applied the approach of the ‘Comparative Manifestos Project’ (CMP) on elections to the European Parliament in order to collect and code all European Parliament election programs of all parties ever represented in that body. In order to preserve comparability with the CMP on the one hand and to make in-depth European-specific analyses possible, the classical CMP coding frame was modified. In which way this has been done is explained in the Euromanifestos Coding Scheme (EMCS).

Based on the classical MRG coding frame, the EMCS is more detailed wherever necessary and includes both, the national and the EU level (according to that coders decide if the governmental frame of the content is national or the EU). The first edition of the EMCS, the EM Coding Instructions, and the Coding Sheet are compiled in the MZES Working Paper 64. For the 2004 Euromanifestos, we have updated the EMCSI to EMCS II.

The Euromanifestos Documentation provides all relevant information on the Euromanifesto collection, on missing Euromanifestos, on the coding, on additional variables provided by the coders, and the information on all variables included in the Euromanifesto dataset. The latter information also contains macro data for each country, party, and election, like electoral participation, vote shares, seats and parliamentary group membership. For the analytical variables that have been computed and used for analyses, the SPSS syntax is documented as well.

 

Documents and Data:

Documents:
MZES Working Paper 64 (pdf)
EMCS II (pdf)
EM Documentation (pdf)

Data:
EM 79_04 (sav)

You are kindly requested
- to identify the source of the findings of secondary analyses you may perform on the basis of this dataset as "Source: Euromanifestos 1979-2004", and
- to send us a copy of the publications that emerge from your analysis.

Computerized Coding of Election Programs

The computerized coding of election programs offers an alternative approach to extracting policy positions from political texts. However, computerized coding requires a special format of the election programs.

We have already scanned all Euromanifestos issued ahead of the 1999 elections. In doing so, we have cleared all scanned EM and have stored these as txt files for the computerized coding. Currently, we prepare the remaining Euromanifestos for computerized coding: that means clear and store them as txt files.

There are different possibilities of computerized content analysis:

a) Textpack
During 2002, we have prepared all Euromanifestos issued on the eve of the 1999 elections to the European Parliament in preparation of the Textpack coding. Dictionaries for the computerized coding have been developed in English, German, French, Dutch, Italian, and Swedish.

b) New methods: Wordscores and Wordfish

Wordfish
http://www.wordfish.org/

Wordscores
http://wordscores.com/

- We are not responsible for the content of the links -