Welcome to the section "Euromanifestos Project"!

Aims of the project

The Euromanifestos-Project at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) aims to collect, code, and analyse manifestos issued to the elections to the European Parliament (“Euromanifestos”). The object of analysing election programs is to measure the issue emphasis and policy positions of parties across countries within a common framework. Election programs are taken as authoritative of the parties’ policy emphases and policy positions at a certain point in time. These election programs are subjected to quantitative content analysis.

 

Quantitative Content Analysis?

In order to collect and code all European Parliament election programs of all parties ever represented in that body we applied the approach of the ‘Comparative Manifestos Project’ (CMP) on elections to the European Parliament.
The manual coding of the election programs (“Euromanifestos”) is one of the most important components of the project. Therefore, expert coders, from each country of the European Union are recruited and trained in coding conferences. The expert coders

1. collect “relevant” Euromanifestos (relevant parties in our project are those that have been represented in the European Parliament at least once), and
2. apply the Euromanifestos Coding Scheme for the coding of each argument of a document.
3. After finishing the coding, the expert coders keep a tally on a coding sheet, and
4. finally, data from this coding sheet is inserted in our Euromanifestos dataset.

Until 2005 our expert coders have been able to collect and code a majority of all Euromanifestos that have been issued for EP elections since 1979. The data had already been used for analyses, and will be analysed further. A database stores all Euromanifestos collected, and the Euromanifesto data is also available for secondary analysis.

 

Past studies and current study

In previous project phases we collected, coded and analysed manifestos issued ahead of the European elections from 1979 to 2004. This was done as modules of the European Election Studies 1999 and 2004.

The current Euromanifestos-Project 2009 is a module of the 2009 European Election Study PIREDEU (“Providing an Infrastructure for Research Intro Electoral Democracy in the EU”).