Mapping Policy Preferences from Texts

On the occasion of the publication of our new book “Mapping Policy Preferences from Texts III. Statistical Solutions for Manifesto Analysts” (Andrea Volkens et al. (Eds.), Oxford University Press 2013) the project “Manifesto Research on Political Representation” (MARPOR), the follow-up project of Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP), holds a conference. This project compiles and distributes (https://manifesto-project.wzb.eu) the only comprehensive set of parties’ policy indicators across 55 countries and seven decades for social, economic and political research. Leading researchers from different projects and approaches will present papers on the states of the art in measuring parties’ policy preferences based on classical and automated content analyses of party programs and discuss future methodological developments with a focus on data reliability and validity of party policy estimates in general and concepts and functions of the left-right scale in particular.