ABSTRACT
This chapter provides insights into the traditional approach of estimating party preferences, that is, text analysis of party manifestos. Party manifestos, which reflect the official preferences that a party assumes on specific issues, have been scrutinised by numerous scholars of party competition. This contribution focuses on data from the MARPOR and the Euromanifestos projects, which can be considered as the two core long-term manifesto research projects covering national and European levels of governance, respectively. This chapter describes the method and data of the two manifesto projects and offers some pertinent examples of scholarly work. Moreover, it discusses the merits and limitations of manifesto data. The chapter concludes with an overview of the avenues for future manifesto research.
