Coding Historical Party Manifestos: How Parties Appeal to Voters in a Democratizing Multinational State

The “Austrian” half of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy ("Cisleithania") provides an excellent opportunity to examine the effects of ethnonational divisions on political behavior in a variety of institutional and demographic contexts, since it gradually implemented universal manhood suffrage in the decades before World War I, and was characterized by extreme ethno-national heterogeneity. In our larger project, we analyze how ethnonational identity categories interact with other social identity categories and influence the outcomes of electoral competition in a democratizing context. We take into account the perspective of both the parties and the voters, drawing on manifesto, demographic, and electoral data.

In this paper, we present our method for comparing party manifestos. We draw inspiration from the Comparative Manifesto Project to elaborate our own coding scheme. Our coding scheme allows the classification of parties according to the social identity categories they appeal to as well as the identification of parties’ positions on different dimensions of political conflict. In this paper, we first review the literature on the coding of party manifestos and pay special attention to the problems of coding historical manifestos. Next, we present the theoretical foundations of our coding scheme. Finally, we select programmatic documents of four German and three Czech parties that together cover a broad range of the Cisleithanian ideological spectrum to test the applicability of our coding scheme. Finally, we present the results of a descriptive analysis of party positions and compare and discuss the external validity of our methodological approach.