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We present a topic-based analysis of agreement and disagreement in political manifestos, which relies on a new method for topic detection based on key concept clustering. Our approach utperforms both standard techniques like LDA and a state-of-the-art graph-based method, and provides promising initial results for this new task in computational social science.

To what extent do political parties in South Africa politicise immigration? We systematically analyse the party manifestos of all major parties in post-apartheid South Africa, using two separate approaches of content analysis: coding all sentences about immigration individually, and coding the electoral manifesto overall using a 'checklist'. Although we can expect high politicisation of immigrants in new democracies, most party manifestos do not treat immigration at all. If parties in South Africa treat immigration in their manifestos, they tend to take relatively inclusive positions, focus on immigrant integration rather than immigration control, and use instrumental frames. It appears that the nation-building project of a post-apartheid South Africa has not led to an increased politicisation of immigration by political parties qua parties, although individual politicians certainly play a role. ; pre-print

The connection between Russia and European political parties has been in the scholarly and popular spotlight recently. While scholars focus on the connection between the far right (and populist) parties and Russia, they have all but ignored the rapidly increasing literature on the role of political parties in foreign policy. This article provides an attempt to bridge these literatures. After analyzing a corpus of party manifestos, the results suggest that there is temporal variation in how European parties have seen Russia since the end of the Cold War. European parties tended to be mostly positive in their views of Russia prior to 2015. Geography and ideology were much less important as a factor in explaining party positions. While some ideological groups share attitudes across different borders, the overall influence of ideology on attitudes toward Russia is minimal.

The European project has enjoyed considerable support from both elite and masses in Portugal. Since the country joined the EEC in 1986, the main political parties have been strong supporters of the Europe project. In recent years, however, this has been undermined by both political and economic crises. In this paper, we produce a preliminary analysis of the competition dimensions in the forthcoming 2014 European elections. We make an empirical analysis of the position held by the five most important Portuguese political parties in relation to European integration, the Euro, debt renegotiation, Eurobonds, and changes in pensions in a context that fosters contestation of European integration and its outputs. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersion

Despite a growing interest in investigating the causes of political corruption, far less attention has been devoted to analysing the conditions under which political actors have an incentive to highlight corruption in electoral competition. Do parties talk about corruption just as a reaction to exogenous factors (i.e. scandals reported in the press)? Or are there systematic patterns in the way parties emphasize this issue during campaigns? Assuming that corruption is a valence issue (i.e. an issue universally supported/disclaimed by electors), we put our investigation in the framework of a one-dimensional model and hypothesize that spatial considerations can affect parties' incentives to emphasize corruption issues. Empirical analysis based on CMP data shows that such an incentive exists for both cabinet and non-cabinet parties, and increases with proximity on the ideological scale.

We present a topic-based analysis of agreement and disagreement in political manifestos, which relies on a new method for topic detection based on key concept clustering. Our approach outperforms both standard techniques like LDA and a state-of-the-art graph-based method, and provides promising initial results for this new task in computational social science.

This article investigates the influence of electoral manifestos on the online communication of electoral candidates. Our study addresses electoral candidates' conflict between party discipline and individual issue prioritisation. Building on the salience framework, we examine the thematic congruence between manifestos and online communication. Moreover, we test which issues are emphasised during the 2017 German federal election campaign. To this end, we created an original topic dictionary based on party manifestos. Applying the dictionary, we classify 143,969 tweets by 797 candidates. Our analyses demonstrate that manifestos shape the online communication of electoral candidates substantially. The findings show that electoral candidates of left–wing parties focus on core issues over time. Our results not only highlight the authority of party leadership, but also suggest that politicians do not tap the whole potential of online communication.

Until now, scholars trying to unravel the phenomenon of nationalization have seldom considered the local policy layer or the ideological dimension as their main subject. This paper, however, studies the ideological nationalization of Flemish local party branches. It applies the method of content analysis of electoral manifestos to the local elections and examines the programmatic overlaps between the party headquarter and its local branches. An innovative nationalization measure is introduced and subsequently included in an explanatory regression model. The results show that ideological similarities are ubiquitous and especially prevailing among leftist parties, in majority-participating party branches, and in large municipalities.

This article examines the determinants of the growing political salience of minimum wages in European party manifestos. By using multilingual quantitative text analysis, I show that the electoral salience of minimum wages has increased in the past decades. Although left-wing parties emphasize minimum wages more than right-wing parties, I find that the electoral salience of this policy follows a U-shaped relationship: right-wing populist parties dedicate greater attention to minimum wages than centre-right parties do. A sentiment analysis finds that compared to other policies designed to supplement the income of low-wage workers, such as strengthening collective bargaining institutions and in-work benefits/wage subsidies, there do not seem to be specific party-political characteristics, which determine the sentiment with which discussions on minimum wages are framed.

The paper examines electoral manifestos of social democratic parties in Visegrad countries through a computer-driven method of content analysis. The analysis focuses on a sentence sentiment (how parties talk about their priorities) and a keyword examination (what parties mostly talk about). Such analysis is not widespread in the academic literature related to Visegrad countries, where a human-based approach to content analysis of electoral manifestos prevails. The paper, however, does not aim to nullify the findings of the previous research, but aims to improve the understanding of the content of manifestos through a different research method. The paper's findings have confirmed the pro-European support of social democratic parties as well as the focus on predominantly socio-economic issues in manifestos. Additionally, the paper explores the effect of incumbency on the manifesto's content. The incumbency seems to have an impact on the manifesto sentiment, but not on keywords.