ABSTRACT
The Manifesto Research Group and its offspring, the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP), have produced important benefits. Its benefits are too many to enumerate, but its importance is easy to appreciate by considering the role of party position, taking in democratic theory and practice. An essential promise of democracy for polities operating on the scale of a nation state is to translate multifaceted popular preferences into a meaningful electoral statement that, in turn, has foreseeable policy consequences. Political parties first organize the packages of policies on offer to electors and later have the responsibility of seeing to it that they translate into policy. Each party does this by stating publicly what, in its view, are the desirable policy emphases, and, in exchange for a promise to make good on the emphases, it asks citizens for vote support.
