Anna Katharina Winkler

The Life Cycle of Party Manifestos: The Austrian Case

Election manifestos are one of the most prominent sources of data for the study of party politics and government. Yet the processes of manifesto production, enactment, and public reception are not very well understood. This article attempts to narrow this knowledge gap by conducting a first investigation into the ‘life cycle’ of election manifestos from the drafting stage to their use in the campaign and post-election periods. Specifically, it investigates the Austrian case between 1945 and 2008 (with special emphasis on the 1990s and 2000s), employing a wealth of qualitative and quantitative data. While the research is thus mostly exploratory, it develops systematic expectations about variation between parties according to their ideology, organisation, government status, and characteristics of their electorates across the stages of the manifesto life cycle. Of those factors, organisational characteristics and status as government or opposition parties were found to be relevant.

Beyond salience and position taking: How political parties communicate through their manifestos

This article examines aspects of election manifestos that are largely ignored by extant manifesto-based studies focusing on issue saliencies and policy positions. Drawing on the literatures on negative campaigning, retrospective voting, party mandates and personalization, we develop a scheme of categories that allows for the analysis of attacks on competitors, references to a party’s track record, subjective and objective policy pledges and the prominence of party leaders in manifestos. We also show that these elements are present in manifestos of major European parties. The relevance of these categories, we argue, should be influenced by a party’s status in government or opposition, its ideology, its size, the relative popularity of party leaders and the occurrence of early elections. Our systematic examination of 46 Austrian election manifestos produced between 1986 and 2013 demonstrates that many of these expectations are supported by the evidence. Most notably, it emerges that government and opposition parties write manifestos that differ with respect to all of the five characteristics analysed. This suggests that there are systematic differences between government and opposition party manifestos that should be taken into consideration by scholars engaged in manifesto-based research.