(Page 1 of 16) - Measuring Party Ideology: Issues and Non-Issues authored by Andrews, Josephine.

Measuring Party Ideology: Issues and Non-issues

Josephine T. Andrews

Department of Political Science

UC Davis

Davis, CA 95616

(530) 754-8108

## email not listed ##

Paper prepared for presentation at the American Political Science Association annual
meeting, August 28-August 31, 2003, Philadelphia, PA. Comments welcome. Do not
quote without permission.

Introduction

Following Downs’ spatial model, many scholars have attempted to operationalize

the ideological position of parties as a point in space. This process requires the
researcher to identify a location, either a point along a single dimension, or a coordinate
in a multi-dimensional space, which is identified as a party’s ideological position.
Obviously, describing party ideology as a point in space is a highly abstract concept.
Accordingly, this approach requires the development of a methodology to reduce highly
descriptive information on party ideology to a precise measurement.

Until recently, the most widely accepted spatial measures of party ideology were

based on data from the Manifestos Data Project (or Manifesto Research Group, MRG),
which is still the most comprehensive data available on party ideology (Budge et al
2001). Of late, however, there has been considerable discussion and debate on how best
to measure party ideology, and previously accepted uses of the MRG manifesto data have
been called into question (Gabel and Huber 2000, Laver and Garry 2000).

At the core of the debate on how to measure party ideology is an important but

often overlooked truth – there are no objective referents with which to judge our
measures of party ideology. Party ideology is wholly constructed by political actors and
political analysts. Further, the spatial location of parties is a model. No measure of party
ideology is devoid of subjective elements. Just where those subjective judgments are
made is often never stated explicitly. Since all measures of ideology will be based on a
subjective decision, none is objectively superior. We must assess a particular measure,
therefore, based on its suitability to the problem at hand. As with any complex model,
the only real support for the validity of our findings is the ability of different researchers
using different data to identify similar relationships.

In this paper, I discuss some of the important issues raised by the debate on how

to measure party ideology. In particular, I attempt to identify the subjective elements of
each measure I consider. I conclude the paper with a brief discussion of my own
substantive research question, one that I have attempted to answer by using the MRG
data. In addition to discussing the suitability of the MRG to this research question, I