Abstract
How can we capture the ideology of a political party? How do we know what a party stands for? This chapter deals with another classic measurement conundrum: How do we reconstruct the identity of social science actors (i.e., a political party) based on their discourse? For decades, political scientists have struggled with the question of how to decipher the ideology of political parties. Most existing studies have used a variety of different approaches and sometimes contradictory strategies to delineate who belongs to a party family. These strategies have tried to assess party membership based on (i) how the parties define themselves, (ii) how experts perceive them, or (iii) applying empirical and transparent criteria that could be used to determine who does and who does not belong to a particular party family.
Current developments of this research are hosted by ECREP (the electoral psychology research initiative) at the London School of Economics (LSE), which is supported by a European Research Council grant entitled ‘Inside the mind of a voter’. Previous elements were supported by an Economic and Social Research Council doctoral scholarship and an LSE seed research fund grant.
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© 2013 Sarah Harrison
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Harrison, S. (2013). Decoding Manifestos and Other Political Texts: The Case of Extreme-Right Ideology. In: Bruter, M., Lodge, M. (eds) Political Science Research Methods in Action. Research Methods Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137318268_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137318268_3
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