Replication Data for: The ties that bind. Text similarities and the conditional diffusion of party policies

Comparative analyses of party policy diffusion are only just emerging. For better understanding the conditions under which diffusion occurs, we argue that three heuristics – availability, representativeness and anchoring – shape parties’ efforts when gathering information (from elsewhere) leading to differing diffusion effects. We operationalize the outcome as textual similarity of party manifestos in 19 Western democracies from 1960 to 2016, applying a text-as-data approach and machine translation. Analyzing dyads, we assess how commonalities and sender/receiver attributes impact diffusion. First, there is little room for cross-border diffusion as successful parties stick to their old program. Beyond the still prevailing domestic context, “learning from cultural reference groups” in a region is most important. Finally, diffusion appears within EP factions and transnational party organizations independently of a success/loss of the sender. Our analysis thus sheds light on (un-)favorable conditions for party policy diffusion and paves the way for future studies applying machine translation and quantitative text analyses.