Responses to political scandals in the campaigning rhetoric of political parties in Europe

The dataset includes aggregated and transformed data obtained from projects titled “Where Is My Party? Determinants of Voter Agreement about the Ideological Positions of Political Parties” and “Where Is My Party? Party Position-taking Between Elections and Its Consequences for Party Performance”, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and appended by the author with additional data about competing parties, countries, and elections. The main data was collected in a process of coding the contents of press articles released in the last month before the elections in ten European countries: the Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. In each of them, data on between three and five elections was gathered. In each country, one right-leaning and one left-leaning daily newspaper was selected among those with the highest circulation. For each newspaper during every included electoral campaign, at least 60 articles were coded. All first-page articles related to the campaign were coded along with a random sample of articles from further pages. The press articles were coded with regard to their policy- and valence-related contents in party campaign messages.