The Manifesto Project User Conference

Since its foundation in the 1970s, the Manifesto Project has provided data for measuring party positions and preferences based on parties’ electoral programs. The Manifesto Dataset which offers data on party preferences on specific policy issues and overarching policy scales in over 60 countries has strongly influenced research on political parties in the last decades. Recently, the Manifesto Project has extended its data collection and now provides access to the Manifesto Corpus – the digital and annotated manifesto collection of MARPOR. This text corpus allows the application of modern methods of text analysis that are receiving increasing attention in political science. Both the data set and the corpus have been and are used to study party competition, political behaviour, processes of democratic representation and questions beyond.

The conference brings together a number of scholars using the Manifesto Dataset and Corpus in various disciplines (e.g. political science, economics, computer science). The conference papers deal not only with research issues from the fields of political parties, representation and campaigns, but also with new computer-assisted methods of text analysis. In his keynote lecture, Patrick Diamond (Queen Mary University of London, former Head of Policy Planning in 10 Downing Street and significantly involved in the drafting process of the 2005 and 2010 Labour manifesto) will deliver insights into manifestos from a scientific as well as from an inside party perspective.