Estimating Policy Preferences Using Expert Data

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This project will assemble information on a range of matters that are central to our understanding of voting and party competition in Western democracies. It is the first stage in the construction of a comprehensive database on the policy preferences of key political actors in a large number of representative democracies. This phase of the research involves a major survey of approximately 1,000 country specialists and is designed to establish the preferred positions of party elites on a range of policy dimensions. Most of these aspects of party policy have not before been the subject of comprehensive cross- national research. In addition, the study will estimate differences between the policy preferences of party leaders and those of other key sections of the parties concerned, including legislators, activists and voters. It will also estimate the importance attributed by leaders to particular policy dimensions; the number of policy dimensions that are important in each party system; the extent to which party leaders trade off the desire to get into office against the desire to affect policy outputs; and the extent to which the leaders of each party have control over party policy. The overall results will bring theoretical and empirical analyses of voting and party competition much closer together. They will also open up new approaches to the understanding of party competition that have hitherto been closed off because of even the vaguest estimates of a number of key variables.