Texts for Content Analysis

While national and international survey data represent the core of our data holdings, we also make available material for content analyses. These are, for instance, responses to open-ended questions regarding the advantages and disadvantages of parties (H. D. Klingemann) and a serious of famous political speeches.

Comparative Party Manifestos Project - CMP

The holdings of the "Comparative Party Manifestos Project - CMP" (Budge, Klingemann, Hofferbert et al.) deserve special mention. In the context of this project party manifestos of the political parties from OECD countries have been collected since 1946. The original collection, looked after by Dr. Andrea Volkens at the Social Science Research Center Berlin has been scanned and prepared for computer-assisted content analysis in a joint project by Paul Pennings and Hans Keman. Since the early 1990s, the collection has been supplemented by parties programs from the younger democracies in Eastern Europe.

Presently the collection embraces contributions from the following countries:

    • Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Finland, France, Great Britain, Ireland, Italy, Iceland, Israel,

    • Japan, Luxemburg, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Norway, Austria, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain,

    • Sri Lanka, Turkey, United States of America.

This makes a total of 1,200 documents available, largely electronically (PDF), upon request. The quality of the scanned documents varies according to the condition of the original documents which was not always optimal. The electronic availability of these documents represents an enormous advantage, since they are now preserved for future research without risk of further physical deterioration.

ZA2570: Comparative Manifestos Project - Programmatic Profiles of Political Parties in 20 Countries 1945-1988

GESIS Data Archive in Cologne makes available a data set based upon a content analysis of party manifestos from twenty countries from 1945 to 1988. This data set can be provided in English with coded categories.

Based upon the scanned documents a sample from the pool of electronic copies was additionally edited in order to extract texts from the original documents. This was done in the context of a research project (Prof. Hans Keman and Prof. Paul Pennings, both Free University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands). These efforts were carried out as part of the "Comparative Electronic Manifestos Project" and in cooperation with the Social Science Research Center Berlin as well as the Central Archive for Empirical Social Research, GESIS, University of Cologne, and the Manifesto Research Group (chairman: Prof. Ian Budge).

Meanwhile, texts from this project are also available for secondary analyses, e.g. quantitative textual analyses. File formats range from system-independent *.txt and *.rtf files as well as Microsoft Word files (*.doc).

    • Further studies containing content-analytical methodology can be researched in our data holdings catalog using the keyword “content analysis”.

    • Data access: Oliver Watteler, M.A., tel.: +49 (0)221-476 94-76, e-mail