Manifestos and ideology: methodological issues and applications to Latin America

Abstract

In this paper we compare the recent dataset of Latin American country party manifestos as coded by the Manifest Project database to other estimations of position on the left-right scale and to another coding of the same documents, discussing their limits and potentialities. The differences found between results offer an interesting opportunity to discuss the method, its reliability, and the validity of the coding scheme and the scales. Our findings suggest that the fragile reliability of the hand-coded content analysis could be circumvented by employing intercoder reliability tests and that users must be cautious when basing conclusions on this project’s results.

O debate metodológico nos estudos de promessas eleitorais

“…), principalmente as promessas caracterizadas em cada material, contêm importantes funções de assessoramento à definição da agenda dos partidos. Essas plataformas, sobretudo os manifestos, são fontes oficiais que, produzidas por amplo debate, contêm as posições concretas e definitivas da candidatura (Tarouco et al, 2022) -que é "responsável por formular um quadro abrangente e detalhado de compromissos" (Royed et al, 2019, p. 293).…”