Expert Survey: Party Ideology in Former Socialist Countries, 1990-2017

Data set on ideology of ruling political parties and coalitions in former socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe.
Data is retrieved from an expert survey which included a multinational panel of 273 experts on party systems of 16 countries. The survey was conducted online in June and July 2017 by Dejan Bursać, researcher at the Belgrade-based Institute for Political Studies, as a part of his doctoral research at the University of Belgrade.
The respondents were asked to locate each party on a general left-right scale, considering all aspects of party policy and all relevant information about a party position. Ideology of each party is presented numerically in the one-dimensional policy space, ranging from 0 (extreme left) to 10 (extreme right), for every parliamentary term/government since the first multi-party elections after the fall of socialism (and in some cases, after achieving national independence) in all 16 countries of the sample. Average ideology of every government is presented as a weighted mean of member parties, in relation to their parliamentary strength.