Abstract
Automatic extraction of party (dis)similarities from texts such as party election manifestos or parliamentary speeches plays an increasing role in computational political science. How- ever, existing approaches are fundamentally limited to targeting only global party (dis)- similarity: they condense the relationship be- tween a pair of parties into a single figure, their similarity. In aggregating over all policy do- mains (e.g., health or foreign policy), they do not provide any qualitative insights into which domains parties agree or disagree on.
This paper proposes a workflow for estimat- ing policy domain aware party similarity that overcomes this limitation. The workflow cov- ers (a) definition of suitable policy domains; (b) automatic labeling of domains, if no man- ual labels are available; (c) computation of domain-level similarities and aggregation at a global level; (d) extraction of interpretable party positions on major policy axes via mul- tidimensional scaling. We evaluate our work- flow on manifestos from the German federal elections. We find that our method (a) yields high correlation when predicting party similar- ity at a global level and (b) provides accurate party-specific positions, even with automati- cally labelled policy domains.
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