POLITICIZATION OF ETHNICITY IN PARTY MANIFESTOS

Paper

(forthcoming in Party Politics)

Oleh Protsyk and Stela Garaz

ABSTRACT

The paper proposes a content analysis framework for textual analysis of programmatic documents, with the goal of identifying party positions on the ethnic dimension of political competition. The proposed approach allows for evaluation and comparison of how party systems in multiethnic states process ethno-cultural claims and demands. Our method of content analysis of party programmatic texts provides adequate granularity to capture the subtleties of ethno-cultural political rhetoric. It also addresses some of the misclassification and measurement problems raised in the literature with respect to the dominant Comparative Manifesto Project’s (CMP) approach to textual analysis. We demonstrate how estimates generated by our method for human-based coding constitute an improvement on the CMP’s estimates of party positions on ethno-cultural issues.

Data files:
Coding manual and coded manifestos
Party positions on ethno-cultural issue: detailed scores, aggregate scores, standard errors of estimates
Inter-coder reliability data and results