Data Sets

Data on Parties’ Positions in Multiple Dimensions across Time and Space

zenodo

/data/econlr.png

Figure 3: Locations of objectives and parties’ positions in the economic policy space

/data/nonmat-objectives.png

Figure 4: Locations of parties’ positions in the non-material policy space

This page provides access to data on parties’ positions in latent political spaces, reconstructed based on data from the Manifesto Project (also known as the ‘Comparative Manifestos Project’) using the method published in Political Analysis as “A Dynamic State-Space Model of Coded Political Texts”. While there is a ‘data verse’ repository associated with that publication, I make the data available at this site because that way it is much easier to maintain and update. In particular you will find here parties’ reconstructed positions on

  1. an economic left/right dimension (or interventionist/free-market dimension) (in variable econlr)
  2. an authoritarian/libertarian dimension (in variable authlib)
  3. an traditionalist/modern dimension (in variable tradmod)

The data come in two variants:

  1. point predictions with measures of uncertainty (more specifically: posterior means and variances and 95% posterior prediction intervals)
  2. multiple imputation values for more careful analysis of party positions as dependent or independent variables. There are two versions currently available: with 5 replications for each party and each time point, with 100 replications for each party time point, and with 2000 replications for each party time point. The 2000-replications file is quite large, so please download it only if you know that you will need it.

The parties in the corresponding data sets are identified by their IDs as in the Manifesto Project data sets.

The current version of the software (an R-package) along with documentation is available here.

If you use the party position data available here, please cite the Manifesto Project in the way they request and cite the Political Analysis article as describing the way the party positions were reconstructed, as well as the DOI given by zenodo.

If you use the software, please cite the Political Analysis article as well as the “manifestos” R package.