AUTNES Content Analysis of Party Manifestos 2008

The AUTNES dataset on party manifestos covers the manifestos of the relevant parties that competed in the Austrian national election 2008. All natural sentences within the manifestos are part of the dataset. The units of analysis are standardized statements derived from these natural sentences by means of a set of unitizing rules based on grammar, not content. The coding procedure applies the AUTNES relational approach of recording subjects, predicates, and objects to party manifestos. The subject actor is usually the party, but it can also be another actor being cited in the manifesto. There are two types of objects: issues and object actors. Issues are recorded by coders selecting from the AUTNES issue coding scheme the one issue that fits the content of the statement best. One object actor can be recorded per statement, each with their name (if an individual is present) and organizational affiliation. The predicate numerically records whether the subject’s position towards the issue or object actor (if present) is one of (conditional) support, (conditional) rejection, or conveys a neutral stance. In addition to the basic subject–predicate–object structure we code character traits for all subject and object actors as well as justifications for issue statements, party record and pledges.

Topics: sentence (the text of the natural sentence); statement derived from the natural sentence; page number of the manifesto where the natural sentence can be found; organizational affiliation of the subject actor (usually the party); name of the subject actor if an individual; attributes of the subject actor; predicate (the relation between subject and object); predicate special (neutral position or a description of objective facts); issue category selected for the statement; statement refers to regulation of the issue on the European level; number of justifications referring to: the economy, protection of the welfare state, protection of the environment, security, education, governance, ethnic or nationalist rationales, religion, universalistic values, and number of justifications in the residual category; reference to a party’s own or a political opponent’s past behavior or achievements at different levels of governance (national level, land level, international level, historical); pledge (subjective pledges: promises whose evaluation requires a value judgement, objective pledges: promises that can be objectively tested); organization of the object actor (usually the party); name of the object actor if individual; characteristics of the object actor (attributes: competence, character, leadership, appearance) ; year of election for which the manifesto was published; party authoring the manifesto; title of the manifesto.

Additionally coded was: ID number for each observation; sentence-ID.