About

The Manifesto Project analyses parties’ election manifestos in order to study parties’ policy preferences. It received a by a long-term funding grant from the German Science Foundation (DFG) from 2009 to 2024 as MARPOR (Manifesto Research on Political Representation) it builds on earlier projects, including the Manifesto Research Group (MRG) and the Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP). The Manifesto Project continues the work of MARPOR (2009-204), the Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP 1989-2009), and the Manifesto Research Group (MRG 1979-1989). In 2003, the project received the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) award for the best dataset in comparative politics.

The Manifesto Project addresses the collection and the comparative content analysis of parties’ manifestos with the support of coders from over 67 different countries. The project team coordinates the generation and the analysis of the data. The Manifesto Project Dataset for the analysis of the policy preferences covers over 1400 parties from 1945 until today in over 67 countries on five continents. The projects main dataset is updated once a year. It provides instant access to manifesto texts and content-analytical data and gives accessible ways to easily explore and visualise the data and text corpus.

We provide several core products that we continuously update and that are freely accessible to the research community and the general public. These are:

Manifesto Dataset: Our main dataset covers over 1300 parties from 1945 until today in over 67 countries on five continents. It is updated once a year. It can be accessed via our R-package manifestoR and our API. All original documents can also be downloaded. More information and how to use

Manifesto Corpus: We provide a large , multilingual text corpus of over 3,200 machine-readable election programs, of which more than 2,000 are annotated at the quasi-sentence level, resulting in approximately 2 million machine-readable quasi-sentences. The corpus is continuously updated and improved and is widely used in the text-as-data community and beyond. Since 2024, the documents, originally in over 40 languages, have also been available in a validated, machine-translated English version of the complete corpus. More information and how to use

manifestoR: ManifestoR is a free package for the open source statistical software R. It provides access to coded election programmes from the Manifesto Corpus and to the Manifesto Project's Main Dataset. The Manifesto Corpus contains the collected and annotated election programmes as tibble/data.frame or in the Corpus format of the package 'tm' to enable easy use of text processing and text mining functionality. More information and how to use

manifestoberta: Since 2023, we have been operating the models manifestoberta-sentence and manifestoberta-context, two large language models (based on multilingual XLM-RoBERTa large models) that have been trained on about 1.9 million annotated statements from the manifesto corpus. They demonstrate high performance in classifying political texts and can assign a variety of political discourses in different languages to the categories of the Manifesto coding scheme. The models are updated annually and are freely available via the Hugging Face Model Hub. More information and how to use

Substantively, the Manifesto Project allows us as researchers for instance to analyse the role of parties at different stages of the political process, and to examine the quality of programmatic representation. It enables studies on the programmatic supply of parties, the relation between parties and voters, the role of parties in parliament, and the translation of party programmes into policy output.