Journal Articles

Measuring Parties’ Ideological Positions With Manifesto Data: A Critical Evaluation of the Competing Methods

---

Within the rapidly growing literature on positioning political parties along policy dimensions, the rich data series collected by the Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP) has been widely considered as the most systematic and objective source of information. For estimating parties’ positions on the Left—Right dimension alone, several different methods have been proposed which make use of the CMP data. However, unless a new method is proposed, there will seldom be any attempt to check the robustness of the findings across different measurement strategies. In this article, we focus on the parties in Greece, which have been notoriously incorrectly positioned by the ‘standard’ method proposed by the CMP. We contrast the ‘standard’ method with various proposed alternatives and show that the latter outperform the former both in terms of face and convergent validity and in terms of reliability. In addition, we show that this cross-checking is essential, since different methods often lead to diametrically opposite results.

---

Availability

No copy data

Detail Information

Series Title

Party Politics

Call Number

-

Publisher

: sage publisher., 2010

Collation

-

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

13540688

Classification

-

Content Type

-

Media Type

-

Carrier Type

-

Edition

Vol. 16 no. 4 July 2010, pp. 427-450

Subject(s)

Ideology
validity
reliability
Left-right
Party manifestos

Specific Detail Info

-

Statement of Responsibility

-

Other version/related

File Attachment

Comments

---

You must be logged in to post a comment