Cross-Validating Measurement Techniques of Party Positioning 1

Christine Arnold, Simon Hug2, and Tobias Schulz
Département de science politique, Université de Genève
 
Paper prepared for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the
American Political Science Association in Toronto (September 3-6, 2009)

First version: March 2009, this version: Jul 12, 2009

Abstract

The deepening and widening of the EU is turning out to be a force capable of rocking national governments, jeopardizing party cohesion, and pitting public opinion against the preferences of party elites. The accuracy of measurement tools to assess party positioning towards European issues increasingly has become a central concern. Only if we have valid and reliable techniques of estimating the position of parties can we begin to ask if parties indeed represent public opinion.

The purpose of this paper is to cross-validate the utility of manual content analysis and computer-based automatic methods. We will assess which technique provides better estimates of party positions on EU constitutional issues and which of those estimates in turn correlate most strongly with the preferences of the respective voters.

This paper will employ data from the European Election Survey 2004 and the national party manifestos that were issued for the European Parliament election of 2004.

Footnotes:

1  Dosei

2  Département de science politique, Faculté des sciences économiques et sociales; Université de Genève; 40 Bd du Pont d'Arve; 1211 Genève 4; Switzerland; phone ++41 22 379 83 78; email: simon.hug@politic.unige.ch

File translated from TEX by TTH, version 3.12.
On 12 Jul 2009, 17:20.