Group-based Appeals in Historical Perspective—Comparing Five Decades of Parties’ Election Campaign Communication with Social Groups

Recent scholarship shows a renewed interest in how political parties connect with various social groups when communicating with voters during election campaigns. However, the scarcity of available data hinders our ability to gain insights into this aspect of the party-voter relationship. As questions of parties’ appeals to social groups are of high value to our examination and understanding of party behavior via-a-vis their voters, we take an important step forward to expand available data on group-based appeals. Thus, this paper presents a new dataset of parties’ group-based appeals, focusing on a cross-national and longitudinal analysis. Covering national-level general election manifestos of 58 political parties from Austria, Germany, Ireland, and the UK between 1970 and 2021, this is the first dataset to allow over-time and across-country comparisons of parties’ direct appeals to social groups. Relying on a comprehensive approach to the concept of group-based appeals developed by Huber and Dolinsky (2023), we build this dataset using advanced computational text analysis methods that combine the detection of social groups as well as identify the stance (positive, negative, neutral) parties take towards the social groups. Processing and analyzing parties’ general election manifestos reveal over-time trends in group-based appeals, showcasing within- and between-country similarities and differences in party behavior. This new dataset facilitates a better understanding of group-based appeals via a coherent conceptualization and enhances scholars’ ability to engage in comparative studies.