Mapping Policy Preferences from Texts

TRAMA

Policy targets and political preferences are summarised in documents such as party manifestos. This book describes how these can be analysed quantitatively, by counting sentences devoted to each policy area. The numbers form policy indicators which can be related to government actions and spending. The book discusses problems with such analyses.

NOTE EDITORE

The Manifesto data are the only comprehensive set of policy indicators for social, economic and political research. It is thus vital that their quality is established. The purpose of this book is to review methodological issues that have got in the way of straightforwardly using the Manifesto data since our two preceding volumes were published and to resolve them in ways which best serve users and textual analysts in general. The book is thus generally about text-based quantitative analysis with a particular focus on the quality of the CMP-MARPOR data and ways of assessing and using them, In doing so the book goes beyond normal data documentation - essential though that is - to confront the analytic issues faced by users of the data now distributed by MARPOR. It also provides concrete strategies for tackling these at the research level, with examples from the field of political representation. The problems of uncertainty, error, reliability and validity considered here are generic issues for political analysts in any area of research, so the book has an interest extending beyond the Manifesto estimates themselves - in particular to other textual analyses. In addition the book widens the range of applications introduced in our two previous volumes and discusses the extension of the manifesto project database to cover Latin America.

SOMMARIO

1 - The Best Tools to Tackle the Job2 - Using The Manifesto Estimates to Correct Systematic 'Centring' Error in Expert and Electoral Positioning of Parties3 - Using The Manifesto Estimates to Refine Party Family Placements4 - Validated Estimates versus Dodgy Adjustments: focusing excessively on Error Distorts Results5 - Understanding and Validating the Right-Left Scale (RILE)6 - Measuring Uncertainty and Error Directly From the End-Estimates7 - Linking Uncertainty Measures to Document Selection and Coding8 - What are Manifestos for? Selecting and Typing Documents for the Database9 - Coder Training: Key to Enhancing Coding Reliability and Estimate Validity10 - Data Entry and Access: Introducing the Manifesto Project Database (MPDb)11 - From Data to Inference and Back Again: Perspectives from Content Analysis12 - Parties and Citizens: Representation over 28 Countries13 - Linking Data-Sets from Party to Individual Levels in order to Evaluate Congruence Measures Comparatively14 - Presidential versus Parliamentary Representation: Extending Manifesto Estimates to Latin America

AUTORE

The Manifesto Research Group (MRG) and its successors - the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) and Manifesto Research on Political Representation (MARPOR) - is an international project which has been collecting and analysing manifestos and platforms from over fifty post-war democracies for over forty years. It is now housed at the Wissenschaftszentrum, Berlin, with a long-term grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG). Having concentrated previously on OECD, EU and CEE countries, it is now extending its collection to Latin America and beyond. For further information please go to https://manifesto-project.wzb.eu

ALTRE INFORMAZIONI

• Condizione: Nuovo
• ISBN: 9780199640041
• Dimensioni: 240 x 27.3 x 162 mm Ø 678 gr
• Formato: Copertina rigida
• Illustration Notes: 51 Figures, 76 Tables
• Pagine Arabe: 346