Party Positions from Wikipedia Classifications of Party Ideology

Abstract

We develop a new measure of party position based on a scaling of ideology tags supplied in infoboxes on political parties' Wikipedia pages. Assuming a simple model of tag assignment, we estimate the locations of parties and ideologies in a common space. We find that the recovered scale can be interpreted in familiar terms of left versus right. Estimated party positions correlate well with ratings of parties' positions from extant large-scale expert surveys, most strongly with ratings of general left-right ideology. Party position estimates also show high stability in a test-retest scenario. Our results demonstrate that a Wikipedia-based approach yields valid and reliable left-right scores comparable to scores obtained via conventional expert coding methods. It thus provides a measure with potentially unlimited party coverage. Our measurement strategy is also applicable beyond Wikipedia.