ABSTRACT
In Part I of this book, we explored theoretical issues generated by describing political competition in terms of “policy spaces” and surveyed different means of mapping these spaces into the world of real political actors. Set in this context, the primary purpose of this book is to provide a comprehensive, accurate, and reliable database of the policy positions of political parties. The previous chapter outlined a range of general issues relating to the measurement of empirical policy spaces and described the advantages of the expert survey method. In this chapter, we describe our own use of expert surveys to estimate both the locations of political parties on key dimensions of policy, and the relative importance of each dimension for each party.
