Introducing the EuroManifestoCorpus: a Comprehensive Resource for Analyzing Party Politics' Supply Side in European Elections

Political scientists have consistently depended on political manifestos as reliable sources for analyzing political parties’ stances on a wide range of issues. These data sources are often analyzed by expert coders using deductive manual procedures based on codebooks with established conceptualizations. However, with the advancement of cutting-edge quantitative text analysis techniques in recent years, political scientists face the challenge of directly analyzing manifestos, utilizing raw, digitalized versions of these texts. While some work of digitalization has been done with national manifestos by the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) team, less attention has been given to manifestos published during European elections. To address this gap, this article introduces the EuroManifestoCorpus dataset, a new collection of Euromanifestos from political parties that competed in European elections across member states from 1979 to 2024. Utilizing the PDF versions of Euromanifestos collected and made available by members of the Euromanifesto Project (EMP), we have designed a step-by-step guide to process and analyze digitized Euromanifestos in both their original languages and in English translation. This guide also includes metadata harmonized with the CHESS and Party Facts datasets. This new resource will enhance opportunities for researchers to conduct in-depth inductive and deductive analyses on a variety of research questions and phenomena across party families and over time.