In empirical research in political science and public policy, we often need estimates of the political positions of governments (cabinets) and the salience of different issues for different governments (cabinets). Data on policy positions and issue salience is available, but typically at the level of political parties. One prominent source of data for issue salience and positions is the Manifesto Corpus, a database of the electoral manifestos of political parties. To ease the aggregation of government positions and salience from party-level Manifesto data, I developed a set of functions in R that accomplish just that, combining the Manifesto data with data on the duration and composition of governments from ParlGov. The see how the functions work, read this detailed tutorial. You can access all the functions at the dedicated GitHub repository. And you can contribute to this project by forking the code on GitHub. If you have questions or suggestions, get in touch. Enjoy!
Research Design Matters