From the work on my PhD thesis I am interested in reconstructing the ideological positions of political parties. In my PhD dissertation I used a relatively simple approach based on multidimensional unfolding of data from the Comparative Manifestos Project. While it worked not too badly for modelling the influence of parties' positions in my dissertation and a later publication in Electoral Studies at an 'ad hoc' feel to it and so I tried to develop a full statistical and measurement model for the reconstruction of political positions from coded political texts.
An early version of this model was presented at the Polmeth XXV conference at the University of Michigan in July 2008. Unfortunately my work on this topic was delayed thereafter, but I was able to concentrate on this project again from 2011. As a consequence I was able to present further results in a research seminar at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, and at the 2012 annual conference of the Midwest Political Science Association in Chicago. The paper now is now published as advance access article by Political Analysis.
Currently I am working on a paper to presented at the 2013 annual conference of MPSA on the distinctiveness of party families.
On this page you will find some news on my research output in this area and some data.
Paper on reconstructing political positions from political texts published in Political Analysis
Posted on Sun, 27 Jan 2013 11:18:47 +0000
My paper on "A Dynamic State-Space Model of Coded Political Texts" has been published as advance access article in Political Analysis.
Accompanying this article, there is a data set with positions of parties in the economic and social policy spaces, reconstructed from Comparative Manifestos Project data using the method in the article. The data set is available from the Political Analysis dataverse. I will make a more extensive data set, suitable for multiple imputations and the like, available on my website in the near future.
New paper about "A Spatial Model of Coded Political Texts" available online.
Posted on Tue, 3 Apr 2012 14:11:09 +0100
I have uploded a paper I am presenting at panel 38-4 "Placing Actors in the Policy Space" of the Annual Conference of the Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA), 12-15 April in Chicago. The paper should be available at the Conference Website here. If it is not, a local copy can be found here.