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Peeping at the corpus – What is really going on behind the equality and welfare items of the Manifesto project?

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posted on 2019-10-15, 11:29 authored by Alexander Horn, Anthony KevinsAnthony Kevins, Carsten Jensen, Kees Van Kersbergen
The Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP) data set quantifies how much parties emphasize certain topics and positions and is very popular in the study of political parties. The data set is also increasingly applied in comparative political economy and welfare state studies that use the welfare-specific items rather than the CMP’s left–right scale to test hypotheses on the impact of political parties on social policies, (in)equality and the welfare state. But do these items provide a valid basis for descriptive and causal inferences? What do the items precisely capture? To answer these questions on concept validity, we use the new manifesto corpus data for German parties 2002–2013 and, to provide a further test, for US parties 2004–2012. Corpus data are the digitalized, originally hand-annotated and coded texts of electoral programmes. We assess the validity of the codings directly at the level of quasi-sentences by re-categorizing and subcategorizing the originally coded statements on equality, social justice and welfare state expansion. Although concept validity concerns about the data seem exaggerated, we find that theoretically relevant and meaningful variation is ‘hidden’ behind the original categories. Hence, our approach allows researchers to assess the substantive meaning of the CMP data directly, and we offer an efficient new strategy for testing more specific hypotheses on the impact of political parties on policy.

Funding

Aarhus University Research Foundation’s AU IDEAS Programme

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Politics and International Studies

Published in

Journal of European Social Policy

Volume

27

Issue

5

Pages

403 - 416

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Rights holder

© The Authors

Publisher statement

Horn, A., Kevins, A., Jensen, C., & Kersbergen, K. V., Peeping at the corpus – What is really going on behind the equality and welfare items of the Manifesto project?, Journal of European Social Policy (27:5) pp. 403-416. Copyright © 2017 (The Authors). DOI: 10.1177/0958928716688263. Users who receive access to an article through a repository are reminded that the article is protected by copyright and reuse is restricted to non-commercial and no derivative uses. Users may also download and save a local copy of an article accessed in an institutional repository for the user's personal reference.

Publication date

2017-02-17

Copyright date

2017

ISSN

0958-9287

eISSN

1461-7269

Language

  • en

Depositor

Dr Anthony Kevins

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