Why automated coding of party positions from manifestos may produce misleading conclusions in political research: Paper now in print

I am happy to announce that a paper co-written with Laura Morales is now available in print at Party Politics. We use different methods to extract party positions from party manifestos and compare them. The focus is on immigration and immigrant integration as topics with varying salience, and we find that automated coding does not lead to consistent estimates. We provide first investigations as to when automated methods (do not) work well to obtain party positions from party manifestos, and suggest ‘checklists’ as an efficient manual method that may be suited in many research applications — one that I have recently validated to work in a non-EuropeanWestern context.

Ruedin, Didier, and Laura Morales. 2019. ‘Estimating Party Positions on Immigration: Assessing the Reliability and Validity of Different Methods’. Party Politics 25 (3): 303–14. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354068817713122.

Ruedin, Didier. 2019. ‘South African Parties Hardly Politicise Immigration in Their Electoral Manifestos’. Politikon: South African Journal of Political Studies 46 (1). https://doi.org/10.1080/02589346.2019.1608713.