AUTNES Content Analysis of Party Leader Statements 2002

The AUTNES coding of leader statements covers all public statements and actions of leaders of relevant parties in the six weeks before the 2002 election, as documented in Austria’s two leading quality newspapers (Der Standard and Die Presse). Leaders are defined as party leaders and top candidates (i.e. those heading the party’s national election list). All natural sentences within the newspaper articles mentioning the leaders are part of the dataset, but the units of analysis are standardized statements derived from these natural sentences. The coding procedure applies the AUTNES relational approach of recording subjects, predicates, and objects to leader statements. Here, subjects are always party leaders or top candidates (with a few exceptions). We record the link between subjects and two kinds of objects, namely issues and object actors. Issues are coded using the comprehensive AUTNES list of issue categories. Object actors are recorded with their name (if an individual is present) and organizational affiliation. The predicate numerically records whether the subject’s position towards the issue or the object actor is one of (conditional) support, (conditional) rejection, or conveys a neutral/ambivalent stance. We record four supplementary variables: character traits for all object actors, leader records for subject and object actors, and justifications for issue statements.

Topics: year of the election campaign; newspaper (Der Standard, Die Presse); date of newspaper publication; page of the newspaper; title of the newspaper article; sentence in the newspaper article; presence of relevant party leader statement; statement extracted from the sentence; organizational affiliation of the quoting actor; name of the quoting actor (if individual); organizational affiliation of the subject actor; name of the subject actor(if individual); predicate (relation between subject actor and issue (or object actor if present); issue coded for the party leader statement; reference of subtitle to regulation or policy at the European level; justification of issue statements (economy, welfare state: expansive / protective, environment, security, education, governance, ethnic-national, religious, universalistic, not discernible); reference to subject actor’s record or object actor’s record if object actor present (national level, Land level, international level, historical); organizational affiliation of the first object actor; name of the first object actor; characteristics of the object actor (attributes: competence, character, leadership, appearance, not discernible).

Additionally coded was: ID.