Policy, Ideology, and Party Distance: Analysis of Election Programmes in 19 Democracies

This research report describes activities of the Manifesto Research Group of the European Consortium for Political Research. Of several projects currently underway, the earliest and most developed has been an effort to collect and analyze election manifestoes of major political parties in 19 democratic nations. The immediate goal of analyses on these data is to represent the parties of each country in an issue space that leads to the identification of salient policy dimensions and is capable of mapping party movements on these dimensions through time (post-war period). Companion projects involving the analysis of coalition compacts and the content of major policy enactments are also described. Finally, the implications of these data sets for a variety of research issues in democratic politics are discussed.