Manifesto Coding

Manifesto coding is the quantitative content-analysis methodology of the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP/MARPOR) for measuring parties' policy preferences from their election manifestos. Trained coders break each manifesto into quasi-sentences and assign every unit to one of a fixed set of policy categories. Counting how often each category appears yields salience measures, and combining pro- and anti- categories produces position scores such as the left–right RILE index, giving comparable estimates of party positions across more than fifty democracies since 1945.