My paper on the role of source language in the automatic coding of political texts (Wordscores, dictionary coding) is now available online. I make use of Swiss party manifestos to examine the impact of source language on party positions derived from the manifestos: does it matter if a French or German manifesto is used? The conclusion is that both stemming and particularly stop words are important to obtain comparable results for Wordscores, while the keyword-based dictionary approach is not affected by language differences. Replication material is available on my Dataverse.
Sociologist. Quantitativist. University of Neuchâtel.
Didier Ruedin 