Replication data for: Putting Parties in their Place: Inferring Party Left-Right Ideological Positions from Manifestos Data

Unfortunately, scholars are hindered in their ability to test existing theories by the limited availability of data that is comparable over time and across countries. This paper describes a simple 'vanilla' method for using manifestos data to estimate party left-right positions.

It then tests this method and four existing ones by regressing a variety of accepted survey-based measures of left-right party positions on the estimates of party positions generated by the various techniques. Finally, analysis of the residuals from these regressions identifies the extent to which there are systematic sources of errors in using manifestos data to estimate party left-right positions. The vanilla method consistently produces the best estimates of party positions, and these estimates are quite good (less than one point, on average, from the estimates of other accepted approaches).