Left–Right Placements of Parties: How Party Elites, Voters, and Experts Interpret Programmatic Shifts

The literature on left–right party placements has drawn on multiple types of data: manifesto content, survey responses of party elites, party voters, and experts. The methodological literature has suggested these sources to be biased in one or the other way. For instance, party voters display a centrist bias in placing parties, expert surveys tend to produce estimates that are imprecise in terms of timing (as experts use historic information), and manifestos typically generate estimates that are much more volatile than survey-based measures. The paper derives testable hypotheses about such biases and their linkages to underlying issue positions. It then compares the answers of more than 4000 candidates in three consecutive national elections in Austria (2006, 2008, 2013) with manifesto data, voter and expert surveys generated in proximity to the relevant elections. The analysis thus takes a first step towards clarifying to what extent the variation in left–right placements between different sources is driven by methodological vs. substantive differences.