Title:      Noughts and Crosses. Challenges in Generating
Political Positions from CMP-Data.

Authors:    Silke Hans, Christoph Hoennige

Entrydate:  2008-08-29 05:40:10

Keywords:   Comparative Politics, Manifesto Data, Party
Positions

Abstract:   The Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) dataset is
the only dataset providing information about the positions of
parties for comparative researchers across time and countries.
This article evaluates its structure and finds a peculiarity: A
high number of zeros and their unequal distribution across
items, countries and time. They influence the results of any
procedure to build a scale, but especially those using factor
analyses. The article shows that zeroes have different meanings:
Firstly, there are substantial zeroes in line with saliency
theory. Secondly, zeroes exist for non-substantial reasons: The
length of a manifesto and the percentage of uncoded sentences,
both strongly varying across time and country. We quantify the
problem and propose a procedure to identify data points
containing non-substantial zeroes. For the future comparative
use of the dataset we plead for a theoretical selection of items
combined with the information about the likelihood that zeroes
are substantially meaningful.

http://polmeth.wustl.edu/retrieve.php?id=826

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