Inducing a cline from corpora of political manifestos

Abstract

Techniques from corpus linguistics are applied to the analysis of a number of European right-wing parties in an effort to extend methods for ranking parties on a left-right spectrum within and across countries and languages. Focus is placed on parties not in government, and analysis is derived from corpora derived from election manifestos published by those parties. The techniques applied are objective in that they apply statistical measures with confidence tests to objectively quantifiable linguistic features of the documents. Valid applicability of the techniques is demonstrated. The methods are then used to estimate pairwise similarity of a number of European political parties, including cross-national comparisons.