Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
acceptedVersion
Publication Date
1-2003
Abstract
Developments in the computerised analysis of political texts now make itmuch easier than before to investigate large volumes of political text inorder to estimate the policy positions of the authors. Previous contentanalyses of party manifestos, for example, have relied on the hand codingof texts (Budge et al., 1987; Laver and Budge, 1992; Klingeman et al.,1994; Budge et al., 2001), or on dictionary-based computer codingtechniques (Laver and Garry, 2000; Kleinnijenhuis and Pennings, 2001;Garry, 2001; de Vries et al., 2001; Bara, 2001). Such analyses, even thosebased on computer coding dictionaries, require heavy human involvement or intervention, creating both a huge resource cost and thepossibility that the many judgement calls inevitably involved will incorporate the biases of the analyst into the results. In an attempt to move beyond these shortcomings, Laver, Benoit and Garry (2003) developed a new probabilistic 'word-scoring' method for computerisedtext analysis and cross-validated this against completely independent sources of data on policy positions. This work included computerised text analysis of Irish party manifestos from the 1997 elections and thetechnique has recently been extended (Laver and Benoit, 2002) to the analysis of Irish parliamentary speeches. In this article we use the word-scoring technique to estimate the policy positions of Irish party manifestos in the 2002 election on four dimensions: economic policy, social policy, environmental policy, and policy on Northern Ireland. The results reported here are from an analysis that was completed within days of the release of the manifestos, and produced initial results before the election had actually taken place.
Discipline
Models and Methods | Political Science
Research Areas
Political Science
Publication
Irish Political Studies
Volume
18
Issue
1
First Page
97
Last Page
107
ISSN
0790-7184
Identifier
10.1080/07907180312331293249
Publisher
Taylor and Francis Group
Citation
BENOIT, Kenneth, & LAVER, Michael.(2003). Estimating Irish party policy positions using computer wordscoring: The 2002 election: A research note. Irish Political Studies, 18(1), 97-107.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/4000
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1080/07907180312331293249