About

The Manifesto Project analyses parties’ election manifestos in order to study parties’ policy preferences. Since October 2009, the Manifesto Project has been financed by a long-term funding grant from the German Science Foundation (DFG) as MARPOR (Manifesto Research on Political Representation). MARPOR continues the work of the Manifesto Research Group (MRG 1979-1989) and the Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP 1989-2009). In 2003, the project received the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) award for the best dataset in comparative politics.

MARPOR addresses the collection and the comparative content analysis of parties’ manifestos with the support of coders from over 50 different countries. The project team coordinates the generation and the analysis of the data. The provided Manifesto Project Dataset for the analysis of the policy preferences covers over 1000 parties from 1945 until today in over 50 countries on five continents. The projects main dataset is updated twice a year. It provides instant access to manifesto texts and content-analytical data and gives accessible ways to easily explore and visualise the data and text corpus.

The MARPOR project aims to substantively analyse the role of parties at different stages of the political process and it specifically examines the quality of programmatic representation. It studies the programmatic supply of parties, the relation between parties and voters, the role of parties in parliament, and the translation of party programmes into policy output.