Replication Data for: Shifting Positions: Party Positions and Political Manifestos in Costa Rica

This paper analyzes how niche parties may utilize a strategy of policy shifting to garner additional voters. We leverage a unique opportunity in which a Costa Rican political party released two different versions of its party manifesto at different moments during a single election cycle. This rare opportunity uncovers how the party shifted from having a hard conservative stance on social issues such as abortion to moderating its stance and centering its focus on less contentious issues throughout a runoff election. Understanding how a single political party may alter its strategy is important since it allows to better gauge the effectiveness of shifting policy positions, and especially for niche parties where a particular issue area is dominant. Moreover, this analysis opens additional avenues of research for scholars focusing their attention on political parties in the Latin American context since research utilizing manifesto data in this context has been limited.