Estimating Irish party policy positions using computer wordscoring: the 2002 election – a research note

Developments in the computerized analysis of political texts now make it much easier than before to investigate large volumes of political text in order to estimate the policy positions of the authors. Previous content analyses of party manifestos, for example, have relied on the hand coding of texts (Budge et al., 1987; Laver and Budge 1992, Klingeman