European Elections and Domestic Politics: Lessons from the Past and Scenarios for the Future

Appendix C Euromanifesto content

Appendix C Euromanifesto content andreas m. wüst The party manifestos issued on the occasions of elections to the European Parliament have been collected and analyzed for all parties ever represented in the EP. Although Euromanifestos have been collected for the complete period from 1979 to 2004, analyses presented in this book exclusively rely on the 1999 Euromanifestos (total N  117).1 In general, national parties issue their own Euromanifesto, but in some cases the national parties adopted their European party federation’s Euromanifesto completely (4) or in part (1), so these documents have also been collected and coded. In sixteen cases, national parties have neither issued an Euromanifesto nor adopted the Euro-parties’ manifesto, but six of them at least issued an official document pertaining to the EP election (such as, for instance , press releases), while in the remaining ten cases, an acceptable substitute (excerpt of the national manifesto; party leader manifesto etc.) could be identified and analyzed. Altogether, only seven parties lack documents for the 1999 EP election of which four are Italian (of a twenty-two record total), two Spanish (regionalists), and one Belgian (CSP). Project information The Euromanifestos Project was funded by two grants of the German Research Foundation (DFG, Germany) starting in January 2002 and 283 ending in December 2005. Research director was Hermann Schmitt of the MZES at the University of Mannheim. Supported by expert coders of all EU countries, the Euromanifestoteamhascollected,coded,processed,andiscurrentlyanalyzing the documents. The analysis is done both by computer-assisted content analysis (Tanja Binder and Daniel Lederle) and by expert coder content analysis (Andreas M. Wüst). First results of the latter analysis are presented by Wüst and Schmitt in chapter 4 of this book. The Euromanifestos have been archived at the MZES (QUIA archive), and the data will later on be made publicly available. An internet page on the Euromanifestos project provides background and up-to-date information on the project: www.euromanifestos.de. Coding For the expert coding of the Euromanifestos, a Euromanifesto Coding Scheme (EMCS) has been developed (Wüst and Volkens 2003).2 The EMCS is a modified and ‘mirrored’ coding scheme compatible to and based on the classical coding frame used for the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) (Volkens 2002; Budge, Klingemann, Volkens, et al. 2001). The EMCS provides the fifty-six original content categories in seven policy domains, but to include EU-specific issues, one domain (‘political system’) has been split into the classical political system domain and a new European Union political system domain, which includes thirteen new EU-specific categories. In total, the EMCS thus provides sixty-nine content categories and various new sub-categories. Further, the mirroring technique enables us to simultaneously identify the governmental frame a party refers to when it is talking about each of the sixty-nine issues covered by the EMCS: national, European, worldwide, and unspecific. Consequently, the Euromanifesto expert coding results in empirical information on the content of the Euromanifestos (like the CMP does for the national party manifestos) combined with data on the political arena in which each of these issues is discussed. Weighting Euromanifesto data are not weighted except for cumulated results for the Europeanpartyfederations,fortheparliamentarygroups,orforcountries.Inthese cases, each party’s Euromanifesto was weighted on the basis of the number of seats they received in the European elections for which the manifesto was written. 284 Andreas M. Wüst Notes 1. There were 118 documents collected and coded, but due to an extremely short document with only twelve arguments, the Belgian Front National has been excluded from the analyses presented in this book. 2. Also available online: http://www.mzes.uni-mannheim.de/publications/wp/ wp64.pdf. Appendix C 285 ...