Expert Estimates of Ideological Spaces and Party Bounds

Abstract

The empirical analysis thus far has been based on party positions as derived from content analyses of manifestos conducted by the Comparative Manifesto Project (Budge et al. 2001). The advantages of using manifestos rather than the judgements of experts to establish party positions are twofold. First, the tendency of parties to issue new manifestos with every election allows changes in party positions to be tracked over time very readily; second, reliance on the CMP data reduces the element of subjectivity in the estimation process. While human judgement plays a significant role both in the content analysis of the manifestos and in the dimensional analysis of the results, this is still a far cry from having experts directly make guesses about policy positions.