The Manifesto Project

Since its formation as the Manifesto Research Group/Comparative Manifestos Project (MRG/CMP), the Manifesto Project has dealt with different aspects of party performance as well as the structure and development of party systems. The project is based on quantitative content analyses of parties’ election programmes from more than 50 countries covering all free, democratic elections since 1945. In 2003, the project received the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) award for the best data set in comparative politics.

The general purpose of the Manifesto Project for the past thirty years has been to measure political preferences of parties across time and space. Since October 2009, the Manifesto Project has been financed by a long-term funding grant from the German Science Foundation (DFG). This grant allows the Manifesto Research on Political Representation (MARPOR) project to update and make available manifesto texts and content-analytical data to the scientific community.

The MRG/CMP project seeks to substantively analyse how parties meet challenges posed in the established OECD democracies and in the young democracies of Central and Eastern Europe. Within this broader context, MARPOR specifically examines the quality of programmatic representation by comparing policy preferences of parties to the left-right self-placements of voters over time and across regime types through to the present.

You can find more information about the project on our project website: https://manifesto-project.wzb.eu.

Since November 2022, the project has been run in cooperation with the Institute for Democracy Research at the University of Göttingen.

Contact: manifesto-communication [at] wzb.eu