Compare methods

	Open-Ended Political Response Coding	Political Ideology Scale
Field	Political Psychology	Political Psychology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1952	1990
Originator	American National Election Studies / Klaus Krippendorff	Hans-Dieter Klingemann & Norberto Bobbio
Type	Qualitative content coding	Self-report
Seminal source	Krippendorff, K. (2004). Content analysis: An introduction to its methodology (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. ISBN: 9780761915454	Fuchs, D., & Klingemann, H. D. (1990). The left-right schema. In M. Kent Jennings & Jan W. Van Deth (Eds.), Continuities in political action. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Aliases	Open-Ended Coding, Likes-Dislikes Coding, Verbatim Response Coding, Master Code Scheme	Left-Right Scale, Ideology Continuum, Political Spectrum Scale
Related	4	3
Summary	Open-ended political response coding is the systematic content analysis of verbatim survey answers, classically the American National Election Studies likes/dislikes about parties and candidates, into a categorical scheme so they can be analyzed quantitatively. It applies content-analysis methodology (Krippendorff, 2004) to capture the substance and sophistication of citizens' political thinking that closed-ended items cannot.	The Political Ideology Scale measures individual self-placement on a left-right political spectrum, capturing fundamental preferences for government role, economic organization, and social values. The single-item self-placement measure (most common) asks respondents to rate themselves on a 0-10 or 0-100 continuum; multi-item versions assess distinct ideological dimensions (economic policy, social policy, nationalism). The left-right axis remains the dominant organizing principle of political competition globally, predicting party choice, policy preferences, and electoral behavior despite critiques that it oversimplifies multidimensional political space.