Scaling hand-coded political texts to learn more about left-right policy content

Manual annotation of the policy content of political texts forms the basis for one of the most widely used empirical measures in comparative politics: left-right policy positions. Bridging automated “text as data” approaches and qualitative content analysis, we apply statistical scaling to this data to learn more about the association of specific policy dimensions to the left-right super-dimension, in a way that minimizes ex ante assumptions about the substantive content of left-right policy. We apply a Bayesian negative binomial variant of Slapin and Proksch’s (2008) “wordfish” model to category counts from party manifestos coded by the Manifesto Project, providing a data-driven approach that offers new insights into the policy content of left and right. We demonstrate how this method also works with content not originally designed for measuring positions. In addition, we show how the approach can be extended to measure the policy content of two latent dimensions, with some categories contributing to both

How preference votes affect the allocation of seats in the European Parliament

Citizens in some EU member states are given the opportunity to select their preferred candidates when voting for parties competing in European Parliament elections. But do these systems actually result in meaningful differences in the allocation of seats? Drawing on newly collected data, Thomas Däubler and Mihail Chiru explore the impact preference votes have on the composition of the Parliament

Do more flexible lists increase the take-up of preference voting?

In many preferential-list proportional representation systems, voting for a candidate is voluntary. Previous studies suggest a positive relationship between the impact of preference votes on seat allocation and how often they are used. However, existing work uses indirect measures on the right-hand side or suffers from the reverse causality problem. Focusing on electoral reform, this study argues that a change in rules affects the extent of personal voting if it alters the beliefs about which types of seat allocation are possible. These types are captured using a new trichotomous measure of list flexibility. The anticipated changes to seat allocation induced by a reform in Sweden allow us to carry out an over-time analysis with appropriate counterfactuals. The results show that moderate increases in list flexibility lead to more preference voting, whereas strong increases cause a drop. Additional analyses suggest that the unexpected decrease results from local parties adjusting their candidate selection strategies

Das Potenzial offener Listen für die Wahl von Frauen zum Bundestag. Ergebnisse eines Survey-Experiments

Frauen sind im Bundestag unterrepräsentiert, insbesondere unter Parteien in und rechts der Mitte. Quotenregeln als vieldiskutierte Lösung greifen jedoch stark in die Freiheiten von Parteien, Kandidat*innen und Wähler*innen ein. Die Option offener Wahllisten hingegen findet wenig Aufmerksamkeit, obwohl sie verfassungsrechtliche Grundsatzprobleme vermeiden würde. Wir untersuchen daher, wie viele Wählerinnen und wie viele Wähler – insgesamt und nach Partei – in Deutschland auf offenen Listen für Kandidatinnen stimmen würden. Theoretisch erwarten wir, dass insbesondere Wählerinnen, Wähler*innen linker Parteien und Wähler*innen mit hoher Themensalienz bezüglich Geschlechtergerechtigkeit Präferenzen für Kandidatinnen ausdrücken. Zudem erwarten wir, dass Wähler*innen ungleich besetzte Listen tendenziell in Richtung Parität ausgleichen. Unser Forschungsdesign basiert auf einem Online-Umfrageexperiment mit einer quotenrepräsentativen Stichprobe der deutschen Wahlbevölkerung. Befragte wählten zwischen Listen der im Bundestag vertretenen Parteien, mit je vier fiktiven Kandidat*innen. Der Frauenanteil auf jeder Liste variierte zufällig zwischen 25 und 75 %, ebenso ob Listen geschlossen oder offen präsentiert wurden. Wir zeigen, dass Wähler wie Wählerinnen das Kandidat*innengeschlecht gemäß oben genannter theoretischer Erwartungen in ihre Wahlentscheidung einfließen lassen. Unsere Ergebnisse lassen damit vermuten, dass Kandidatinnen aufgrund ihres Geschlechts wohl insgesamt kaum benachteiligt würden, es aber Subgruppen in der Bevölkerung gibt, die sich bewusst für männliche Politiker entscheiden (Wähler der FDP, Wählerinnen der AfD). Insgesamt zeigt unser Beitrag, dass offene Listenwahlsysteme es Wähler*innen nicht nur ermöglichen, ihre Präferenzstimme im Sinne von Geschlechterrepräsentation einzusetzen, sondern dass Wähler*innen diese Möglichkeit auch nutzen. Hervorzuheben ist dabei auch die Tendenz, dass Wähler*innen über Parteielektorate hinweg ungleiche Listenvorschläge der Selektorate ausbalancieren. Die Debatte zur Reform des Wahlrechts sollte einer Einführung offener Listen deshalb mehr Beachtung schenken

How open lists undermine the electoral support of cohesive parties

How does ballot structure affect party choice? We argue that open lists undermine the electoral support of cohesive parties, to the benefit of internally divided parties. We conduct a survey-embedded experiment in the aftermath of the European migrant crisis, presenting German voters with real parties but fictitious politicians. A crossover design varies ballot type and exposure to candidate positions on immigration. We find that the internally divided Christian Democrats gain votes at the expense of the cohesive Alternative for Germany when open lists are used and candidate positions are known. For individuals who are equally attracted to both parties, switching is most likely if their immigration preferences lie near the midpoint between the two parties. Overall, our analysis establishes conditions under which ballot structure can affect the electoral performance of parties in general, and that of the populist right in particular

Natural Sentences as Valid Units for Coded Political Texts

Despite the recent focus on scaling policy positions by treating political text as quantitative data, huge investments in political science continue to use expertcoded content analysis, namely the 30-year Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) of coded manifestos as well as the Comparative Policy Agendas Project (CAP). All text analysis methods require the identification of a fundamental unit of analysis. The fundamental unit of analysis in both CMP and CAP is the “quasi sentence”, which is either a natural sentence, or a part of a sentence judged by the coder to have an independent component of meaning. The use of subjective judgment in identifying quasi-sentences, however, means that specification of the fundamental unit of data analysis is endogenous to the content of the text. In addition, it is known that the unitization of political texts into endogenous quasi sentences by expert coders generates unreliable specifications of the unit of analysis. The justification for using quasi-sentences is a supposed gain in associated validity of the codings. In this paper, we show that this justification is empirically questionable, since using quasi-sentences does not produce valuable additional information in characterizing substantive political content. Defining text units exogenously as natural language sub-units separated by one of a predefined list of punctuation marks, by contrast, generates perfectly reliable unitization, with no measurable cost in terms of the content validity of the resulting estimates

What the UK general elections of 2005/10 tell us about the demand for manifestos (and the other way round)

Conventional wisdom and rational choice theory agree: few citizens read election manifestos. The empirical observations that people do search for manifestos online and that UK parties do find buyers when selling their manifestos, therefore pose a puzzle. From studying these phenomena in the context of the 2005 and 2010 General Elections, we can learn that the standard view needs to be qualified and can gain additional insights into those elections. The article suggests two explanations of manifesto acquisition: highly-interested citizens may obtain the documents of several parties, or strong partisan supporters may secure themselves the manifesto of ‘their’ party, and both mechanisms may be reinforced by the competitiveness of constituency races. Analyses of original behavioural data on manifesto sales and internet search activity show that there is indeed interesting empirical variation in the demand for election manifestos across space and time. Results from Bayesian ecological inference models of the sales data slightly favour the partisan explanation

Links-rechts und darüber hinaus - eine Neuvermessung der deutschen Parteienlandschaft mit einem auf die MARPOR/CMP-Daten angewandten IRT-Modell

Sowohl die theoretische Bedeutung der links-rechts-Dimension als auch die Methodik zu ihrer empirischen Ermittlung sind umstritten. Der Beitrag analysiert die inhaltsanalytisch gewonnen MARPOR/CMP-Daten mit einer innovativen induktiven Methode. Das Item-Response-Theory-Modell erlaubt nicht nur die Bestimmung von Parteipositionen, sondern ermöglicht auch neue Einsichten in den Gegenstand des politischen Konflikts, hier angewandt auf Deutschland (1990–2013). So wird etwa klar, dass die links-rechts-Achse in diesem Zeitraum nicht nur von der Wirtschafts- und Gesellschaftspolitik, sondern auch von der Außenpolitik geprägt wurde. Die Ergebnisse widersprechen außerdem der weitverbreiteten These von einer Konvergenz der Volksparteien und Lager bei den Wahlen 2009 und 2013. Eine Erweiterung des Modells auf zwei Dimensionen zeigt unter anderem auf, dass das Thema Umweltschutz in den Wahlprogrammen eher gesellschaftspolitische als wirtschaftspolitische Positionen zum Ausdruck bringt

Wie entstehen Wahlprogramme? Eine Untersuchung zur Landtagswahl in Baden-Württemberg 2006

Election manifestos play an important role both in political practice and in political science research. Nevertheless there are only few studies which examine how parties develop election manifestos. I present an exploratory study of the preparation of the election manifestos for the German state level election in Baden-Württemberg in 2006. The empirical analysis consists firstly of interviews with key actors in the preparation process and secondly of a comparison between the manifesto proposals the party leaderships presented to the party conferences and the final versions. Based on the interview findings I introduce a stylized model of manifesto preparation. The results show that the process was comparatively similar across parties, but there were differences especially with regard to the involvement of party members prior to the party conference stage. This involvement was lower in the two large parties CDU and SPD. All examined party conferences extended the leadership’s manifesto proposal considerably. The Greens and the WASG, the two parties with the supposedly most strongly policy-oriented members, changed the original versions more strongly than the others