Strengths and weaknesses of approaches to measuring policy positions of parties

Volkens, Andrea

doi:10.1016/j.electstud.2006.04.003

Cited by 109 publications

(87 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Each of these approaches uses different data sources and makes different implicit or explicit assumptions regarding the dimensionality of political space, whereas some methods are considered to be more suitable than others depending on the political context and the particular research question. These differences notwithstanding, there is no apparent consensus regarding the validity and reliability of party position estimates when alternative methods are compared with one another (Volkens, 2007;Dinas and Gemenis, 2010).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Estimating parties’ policy positions through voting advice applications: Some methodological considerations

Gemenis

2012

Acta Polit

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The past few years have seen the advent and proliferation of Voting Advice (or Aid) Applications (VAAs), which offer voting advice on the basis of calculating the ideological congruence between citizens and political actors. Although VAA data have often been used to test many empirical questions regarding voting behaviour and political participation, we know little about the approaches used by VAAs to estimate the positions of political parties. This article presents the most common aspects of the VAA approach and examines some methodological issues regarding the phrasing of statements, the format of response scales, the reliability of coding statements into response scales and the reliability and validity of scaling items into dimensions. The article argues that VAAs have a lot of potential but there is also much space for methodological improvements, and therefore concludes with some recommendations for designing VAAs.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Estimating parties’ policy positions through voting advice applications: Some methodological considerations

Gemenis

2012

Acta Polit

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“…Our focus on the aggregation of national programmes within a multinational EP majority adds a theoretical level to approaches that focus on whether national party programmes represent the preferences of voters (Volkens 2007) or on cohesion in EP voting in a multi-national party group (Hix et al 2007;Vote Watch 2012). It does so by linking the aggregation of national party programmes in party groups with the votes of groups combining to form an EP majority on policies.…”

Section: While Members Of the European Parliament Are Elected In Natimentioning

confidence: 99%

Aggregation and Representation in European Parliament Party Groups

Rose¹,

Borz²

2013

West European Politics

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“…Although some authors seem to treat them as such in their validation approaches, expert surveys do not represent 'true' party positions, but rather estimates of these positions with their own strengths and weaknesses (Budge, 2000;Steenbergen and Marks, 2007;Volkens, 2007), and so their use in discriminating against competing manifesto scales is problematic. Even leaving these debates to one side, the fact that many different scales, composed of different manifesto components and combined by different methods, all apparently perform equally well in terms of convergent validity suggests that although cross-validation is an essential method of establishing the general validity of different scales, it is perhaps less useful as a technique for choosing between them.…”

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confidence: 99%

Building policy scales from manifesto data: A referential content validity approach

Prosser

2014

Electoral Studies

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Researchers using scales based on MRG/CMP/MARPOR's manifesto dataset face a bewildering array of different scales. The validation of these scales has tended to focus on external, convergent validity. The actual content of these scales has received less attention and the choice of the manifesto components which make up these scales has often been conducted by either opaque or questionable methods. This article develops a critique of existing methods of component selection and proposes a new method of component selection based on the covariance of components with 'naïve' provisional scales, which are refined in an iterative process. It uses this method to construct a set of comparable one (general left-right) and two (economic and social) dimensional scales -filling a gap in the existing body of scales that will allow researchers to compare dimensionality across models without inadvertently comparing different assumptions that underlie the construction of the scales.

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Strengths and weaknesses of approaches to measuring policy positions of parties

Cited by 109 publications

References 12 publications

Estimating parties’ policy positions through voting advice applications: Some methodological considerations

Estimating parties’ policy positions through voting advice applications: Some methodological considerations

Aggregation and Representation in European Parliament Party Groups

Building policy scales from manifesto data: A referential content validity approach

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