The Empirical Determinants of Manifesto Content
Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: Party manifestos form the largest source of textual data for estimating party policy positions, typically based on methods that assume that longer manifestos with more units of text provide more confident estimates. Despite using them extensively for nearly three decades, however, we know little to nothing about what explains why either the overall length of manifestos or their scope of issue coverage varies so highly across parties, elections, and contexts. Here, we critically test the notion that political context affects overall length and manifesto content. We use multi-level modeling to predict manifesto length and issue scope in a large number of coded party manifestos covering the post-war period. Our findings indicate that manifesto length and the scope of issue coverage can be largely explained by a combination of political variables related to party size, policy orientation, as well as election-specific factors related to political competition and the timing of elections.
Authors: Thomas Däubler, Kenneth Benoit
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2200531473