Market Liberalism and Political Parties – Exploring the Meaning and the Positioning of Political Parties on the Economic Dimension

Combining concepts of political science with party positions is a common attempt. The conventional narrative see market liberalism as a very salient conflict dimension, but a convincing measurement of party positions on such a dimension is still missing. I discuss conflicting conceptions of market liberalism and their potential measurement on the level of sub dimensions and indicators. I apply a latent variable model using structural equation modeling with Manifesto Data. The validity of the results are discussed and compared to competing measures of the economic dimension with expert surveys, self-placements of party leaders and reproduced measurements of different researchers. It turns out, that two factors mainly explain differences of the competing approaches: Conceptual differences are translated into measurements differences and the degree of context sensitivity within these approaches explain the variance of the competing measurements at hand.