Abstract
It is often claimed that computational methods for examining textual data give good enough party position estimates at a fraction of the costs of many non-computational methods. However, the conclusive testing of these claims is still far from fully accomplished. We compare the performance of two computational methods, Wordscores and Wordfish, and four non-computational methods in estimating the political positions of parties in two dimensions, a left-right dimension and a progressive-conservative dimension. Our data comprise electoral party manifestos written in Finnish and published in Finland. The non-computational estimates are composed of the Chapel Hill Expert Survey estimates, the Manifesto Project estimates, estimates deriving from survey-based data on voter perceptions of party positions, and estimates derived from electoral candidates’ replies to voting advice application questions. Unlike Wordfish, Wordscores generates relatively well-performing estimates for many of the party positions, but despite this does not offer an even match to the non-computational methods.
Highlights
Since the classical works by Downs (1957) and Stokes (1963), the ideological positioning of political parties has been much examined in political science
Our research question is: How do the Wordscores and Wordfish party position estimates perform in the left-right dimension and the progressive-conservative dimension in comparison to the Chapel Hill Expert Survey estimates, the Manifesto Project estimates, estimates aggregated from the survey data of the Finnish National Election Study, and estimates derived from the data of Finland’s two foremost voting advice applications? we examine the comparative performance of the two computational methods using the results obtained using the four noncomputational methods as benchmarks
We deem that the comparative performance of Wordscores deserves to be taken seriously in the estimation task both in the left-right dimension and the progressive-conservative dimension
Summary
Since the classical works by Downs (1957) and Stokes (1963), the ideological positioning of political parties has been much examined in political science. We use the Chapel Hill (CHES) position estimates representing expert surveys; the Manifesto Project position estimates representing an advanced variant of quantitative content analysis; the aggregated results of the Finnish National Election Study (FNES) representing mass surveys; and the refined results of electoral candidates’ responses in Finland’s two foremost voting advice applications (VAAs). Our research question is: How do the Wordscores and Wordfish party position estimates perform in the left-right dimension and the progressive-conservative dimension in comparison to the Chapel Hill Expert Survey estimates, the Manifesto Project estimates, estimates aggregated from the survey data of the Finnish National Election Study, and estimates derived from the data of Finland’s two foremost voting advice applications?
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