Dimensions of political conflict and party positions in multi-level democracies: evidence from the Local Manifesto Project

Gross, Martin und Jankowski, Michael (2019): Dimensions of political conflict and party positions in multi-level democracies: evidence from the Local Manifesto Project. In: West European Politics, Bd. 43, Nr. 1: S. 74-101

Abstract

Partisan conflicts have been frequently analysed in comparative political science research. Yet little is known about the dimensions of political conflict at the local level in multi-level democracies. This article contributes to the literature on the estimation and analysis of party positions by first presenting a new dataset of more than 800 local party manifestos in Germany that allows for a systematic analysis of the dimensions of political conflict at the German local level. Secondly, it is demonstrated that (semi-)automatic content analysis of these texts offers a promising approach for gaining new insights into local party positions. Thirdly, the empirical analysis of German local party manifestos shows that partisan conflicts are not only structured along the left-right dimension but also along a dimension which distinguishes between parties addressing 'local' and 'national' issues to a varying degree in their manifestos, due to the different behaviour of established and populist parties.

• Dokumententyp: Zeitschriftenartikel
• Fakultät: Sozialwissenschaften
• Themengebiete: 300 Sozialwissenschaften > 300 Sozialwissenschaft, Soziologie
• ISSN: 0140-2382
• Sprache: Englisch