Estimating policy positions from political texts

The analysis of policy-based party;;competition will not make serious progr ess beyond the constraints of (a) the unitary actor assumption and (b) a st atic approach to analyzing party competition between elections until a meth od is available for deriving; reliable and valid time-series estimates of t he policy positions of large numbers of political actors. Retrospective est imation of these positions;In past party systems will require a method for estimating policy positions from political texts. Previous hand-coding content analysis schemes deal with policy emphasis rat her than policy positions. We propose a new hand-coding scheme for policy p ositions, together with a new English language computer,coding scheme that is compatible with this. We apply both schemes; to party manifestos from Br itain and Ireland in 1992 and 1997 and cross validate the resulting estimat es with :those derived from quite independent expert surveys and with previ ous,manifesto analyses. There is a high degree of cross validation between coding methods. includin g computer coding. This implies that it is indeed possible to use computer- coded content analysis to derive reliable and valid estimates of policy pos itions from political texts. This will allow vast Volumes of text to be cod ed, including texts generated by individuals and other internal party actor s, allowing the empirical elaboration of dynamic rather than static models of party competition that move beyond the unitary actor assumption.