Estimating the Policy Positions of Political Parties From Legislative Election Manifestos 1958-2002

This article gives an overview of the French party manifestos archived at the Berlin Science Center under the auspices of the Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP), formerly the Manifesto Research Project (MRP), and illustrates how the content of these documents can be used in order to estimate the policy positions of the major political parties from the start of the Fifth Republic (1958) up to and including the legislative elections of 2002. We show that the CMP coding method enables a reliable and plausible estimation of party policy positions. The possibility of comparisons over time gives this data source an important advantage over alternative sources on party policy positions.