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The Impact of Party Cues on Manual Coding of Political Texts*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 September 2017

Laurenz Ennser-Jedenastik  and
Thomas M. Meyer
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Abstract

Do coders of political texts incorporate prior beliefs about parties’ issue stances into their coding decisions? We report results from a coding experiment in which ten coders were each given 200 statements on immigration that were extracted from election manifestos. Party labels in these statements were randomly assigned (including a control category without party cues). Coders were more likely to code a statement as pro-immigration if it was attributed to the Greens and less likely choose the anti-immigration category if it was attributed to the populist radical right. No effect was found for mainstream parties of the center-left and center-right. The results also suggest that coders resort to party cues as heuristics when faced with ambiguous policy statements.

Type
Research Notes
Information
Political Science Research and Methods , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , July 2018 , pp. 625 - 633
Copyright
© The European Political Science Association 2017 

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Footnotes

*

Laurenz Ennser-Jedenastik, Assistant Professor ([email protected]) and Thomas M. Meyer, Assistant Professor ([email protected]), Department of Government, University of Vienna, Rooseveltplatz 3/1, 1090 Vienna. To view supplementary material for this article, please visit https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2017.29

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