Recent years have seen a proliferation of research on political parties as one of the key democratic institutions connecting citizens and the state. But most data has been collected in Europe. How do parties compare in nations around the globe? This study addresses this issue, comparing party ideologies, issue positions and rhetoric.

Our Methods

Expert Respondents

The Global Party Survey engaged a wide range of 1,861 academic experts on political parties, public opinion, elections and legislative behavior. These experts were asked to estimate the ideological values, issue position and rhetoric of parties in the country where they have their main expertise.

The study gathered information about the 10 largest political parties with representation in the current lower (or single) house of the national parliament. Responses were received from 170 independent nation states, defined as those with populations over 100,000 which hold national legislative elections, irrespective of the degree of party competition.

The survey was translated so that it was available to complete through a pull-down menu in any of into six languages (Deutsch, English, Español Français, Русский, 简体中文).

A PDF version of the questionnaire can be downloaded here.

Questions

Questions with 0-10 point scales are designed to monitor each political parties’ overall position on three core dimensions: including their left-right stance towards the economy, social liberalism or conservative values, and their use of populist rhetoric.

Experts were also asked to estimate both the position and salience towards a range of current policy issues, including those concerning the environment, international affairs/foreign policies, immigration policies, and political processes. Experts were also asked to identify the use of rhetoric by each party, including their use of populist or pluralistic language.

The Qualtrics questionnaire also gathered information about the familiarity of experts with each party, and their own ideological values, as well as their background characteristics, such as their age, gender, and country of citizenship.

All replies are treated in the strictest confidence and no individual identifiers are released.

Period of fieldwork

Fieldwork started on 19th November 2019 and continued for one month, involving one invitation plus two subsequent reminders.

The list of experts was also improved and updated by the ‘snowball’ technique, refining the list of experts at the suggestion of respondents.

Meta-data and release

The results of the study are in the process of being cleaned and merged with other standardized metadata gathered by other projects about countries, political parties and elections, including the vote and seat share of parties contesting recent national parliamentary elections. This includes linkage with the Party Facts Project, a gateway to empirical data about political parties as recorded in social science datasets. Robustness tests an also be examined, comparing GPS estimates with the latest CHES survey data.

The first release of the final dataset will be made available for use in several common formats in early-2020, available for download via Harvard’s Dataverse.

Thanks are due to all those country experts who participated in the study, as well as all those who provided suggestions about the survey design, and particularly partnership with the Chapel-Hill Expert Survey (CHES).