Measurement of party positions on the basis of party programmes, media coverage and voter perceptions

A policy position is more or less important, intense and prioritised. A policy position also has also a direction: parties are more or less pro-or contraspecific solutions. We label the emphasis on a specific topic/theme/issue as issue saliency. The positive or negative tenor of the viewpoint on the issue is labelled as the direction of an issue position. The direction of an issue position is simply labelled as the ‘issue position’ when confusion is unlikely. Policy positions resemble physical forces, which have to be represented also as vectors with both a length (saliency) and an angle (direction).