Project description

The Manifesto Project provides the scientific community with parties’ policy positions derived from a content analysis of parties’ electoral manifestos. It covers over 1000 parties from 1945 until today in over 50 countries on five continents. The DFG-funded MARPOR project continues the work of the Manifesto Research Group (MRG) and the Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP). On this website you find the Manifesto Project Dataset containing the parties' policy preferences generated by the project. You also find coded and uncoded election manifestos of the parties in the dataset as well as information and links to many applications for the dataset, related projects and publications etc.

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News

(2016-07-22) Society for Political Methodology's 2016 Statistical Software Award

• We are happy to announce that Jirka, Sven, Pola and Nicolas won the Statistical Software Award 2016 of the Society for Political Methodology for manifestoR and the manifesto API. The Society for Political Methodology is the Methodological Section of the American Political Science Association.

(2016-06-09) Berlin Digital Humanities Prize 2016

• We are happy to announce that the team of the Manifesto Corpus won the Berlin Digital Humanities Prize 2016. The prize is sponsored by the interdisciplinary research network on digital humanities Berlin. Find more details and pictures from the ceremony here.

(2016-05-26) New Dataset Version 2016a

• Dataset version 2016a is now available. We added many new observations, corrected some errors and even added some new variables. Check out all changes in the release notes.

(2016-02-05) Article published on the Manifesto Corpus

• Have a look at our new article with the title "The Manifesto Corpus: A new resource for research on political parties and quantitative text analysis".
• The article is published in the peer-reviewd open-access journal Research & Politics. It announces the Manifesto Corpus and illustrates potential applications for substantive research.

(2016-03-22) New Version of R package manifestoR and Manifesto Corpus released

• Since today, a new version (1.2) of our R package manifestoR is downloadable from CRAN. It adds accessibility to the Manifesto Project's South America Dataset and several other features, which are documented in the ChangeLog. Also, the Manifesto Corpus Version 2016-2 was released in parallel, containing the coded manifestos for all our South America Observations. For full and easy access to these documents, manifestoR version 1.2 is required!

(2015-12-10) Successful extension of MARPOR funding (2016-2019)

• We received the confirmation that the funding of MARPOR by the German Research Association (DFG) will be extended by three more years from 2016 to 2019.

(2015-11-19) Release of next update

• We currently do not plan to release an updated version of the dataset within this year. Only little data is currently ready and it is not worth to create a new version of the dataset. We will code some more data and bundle for an update in the first half of 2016. This update will then also include data for the UK General elections of 2015.

(2015-10-02) Job announcement

• We are hiring up to three student assistants in Berlin. See the job announcement on the WZB website (in german or english). Deadline is the 12th of October.

(2015-09-11) We are now on twitter.

• @manifesto_proj announces new versions and corrections of the dataset and keeps you up to date on research using manifesto data.

(2015-09-11) Small updates to the website

• We slightly restructured the website and added some new content. We will continue to improve the website in the future. Let us know if you have problems or comments.

(2015-09-10) What happened during the last months...

• Coded manifestos available through the Manifesto Corpus: The Corpus publishes the digital codings on the quasi-sentence level the project has produced since 2009. It allows users to verify and check our codings, recode the data for their own purposes, create new subcategories, use them for automatic analysis, etc.

• Release of manifestoR: an R packages facilitating use and access of the Manifesto Project Data.

• Update 2015a available: It is the first dataset that reports data coded on the basis of the new category scheme. Check Version 5 of the coding instructions to learn more about the new category scheme. For everyone doing over time comparisons the dataset also reports the data aggregated into the old category scheme.

• First data from South American countries published: This new dataset will provide data on South American parties and presidential candidates. So far it contains data from Argentina, Brazil and Chile, more countries and elections will follow.

Twitter @manifesto_proj

Citation

If you use any of the data you find on this website, please cite us. You find the correct citation for all datasets on all download pages. If you use the documents, please cite the Manifesto Corpus.