The Manifesto Project User Conference 2023

Key Information

27-28 November 2023

University of Göttingen, Germany

manifesto-conference@wzb.eu

Conference Organizers: Denise Al-Gaddooa, Tobias Burst, Simon Franzmann, Christoph Ivanusch, Pola Lehmann, Felicia Riethmüller, Bernhard Weßels, Lisa Zehnter

Preliminary Conference Program (pdf)

Call for Papers (pdf)

The Manifesto Project team invites users of the Manifesto Project Dataset and/or the Manifesto Corpus to submit abstracts for a conference on 27-28 November 2023 to be held at the University of Göttingen, Germany, co-organized by the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB).

The Manifesto Project and its data collection have had a strong influence on research on political parties in the last decades. For the past fourty-four years, the general purpose of the Manifesto Project has been to measure political preferences of parties across time and space.

Since our last conference before the pandemic, the Manifesto Project looks back on many exciting developments. Its dataset has continuously been expanded and now covers manifestos from nearly 70 countries. Just recently, the Manifesto Project Dataset and Corpus have seen one of their biggest updates yet (2023a), adding many new Latin American countries, for instance. Moreover, the project has found a new (second) home at the Department for Democracy Research of the University of Göttingen - where we are happy to invite scholars using the Manifesto Project Dataset or Corpus for a dialogue on current developments and perspectives this fall!

Scholars of party competition and party communication use party manifestos to study pressing questions of political representation, populism, issue salience, party-group relationships, or party positions in transforming political spaces. Moreover, there have been impressive developments in computational approaches to automating the Manifesto coding scheme with supervised learning. The project’s large annotated textual data base provides exciting conditions for this process.

The aim of the conference is to bring together scholars from all fields of research using Manifesto Data data, in order to foster exchange and dialogue between users and the core team. The conference offers participants the opportunity to present current projects.

We are looking forward to contributions that

  • Make innovative use of the Manifesto Project Dataset or Corpus for substantial research on political parties, political science in general, communication studies or computational social science
  • Advance the methodological and substantial debate on the Manifesto Corpus and the Manifesto Data in general
  • work on (cross-domain) classification of other documents using the Manifesto coding scheme and/or work on other (automated) content analyses using Manifesto data

For more information on the Manifesto Project please visit our website https://manifesto-project.wzb.eu/ or follow us on Twitter @manifesto_proj

Submissions: Please submit an abstract of max. 300 words with a paper title, 3-5 keywords, and the name and affiliation of all authors to manifesto-conference@wzb.eu.

Deadline for abstract submission: 21.07.2023

Notification of acceptance: 18.08.2023

Deadline for paper submission: 20.11.2023

Travel costs We aim to support early career researchers with the travel costs. In case you are in need of such a travel grant in order to attend the conference, please inform us.

We are looking forward to your submissions!