The Manifesto Project
Since its formation as the Manifesto Research Group/Comparative Manifestos Project (MRG/CMP), the Manifesto Project has dealt with different aspects of party performance as well as the structure and development of party systems. The project is based on quantitative content analyses of parties’ election programmes from more than 50 countries covering all free, democratic elections since 1945. In 2003, the project received the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) award for the best data set in comparative politics.
The general purpose of the Manifesto Project for the past thirty years has been to measure political preferences of parties across time and space. Since October 2009, the Manifesto Project has been financed by a long-term funding grant from the German Science Foundation (DFG). This grant allows the Manifesto Research on Political Representation (MARPOR) project to update and make available manifesto texts and content-analytical data to the scientific community.
The Manifesto Project entails the collection and the comparative content analysis of parties’ manifestos to determine parties’ policy preferences. The project team coordinates the generation and the analysis of the data with the support of coders from over 67 different countries. The Manifesto Project Dataset covers over 1400 parties from 1945 until today in over 67 countries on five continents. The projects main dataset is updated once a year. The Manifesto Corpus makes the underlying manifesto data accessible. The website provides instant access to manifesto texts and content-analytical data and allows to easily explore and visualise the data and text corpus. In addition, the project’s large language model manifestoberta enables users to apply the Manifesto Project’s coding scheme to further documents.
You can find more information about the project on our project website: https://manifesto-project.wzb.eu.
Since November 2022, the project has been run in cooperation with the Institute for Democracy Research at the University of Göttingen.
Contact: manifesto-communication [at] wzb.eu