TY - JOUR A1 - Lowe, Will A1 - Benoit, Kenneth A1 - Jankin, Slava A1 - Laver, Michael T1 - Scaling Policy Preferences From Coded Political Texts JF - Legislative Studies Quarterly N2 - Scholars estimating policy positions from political texts typically code words or sentences and then build left-right policy scales based on the relative frequencies of text units coded into different categories. Here we reexamine such scales and propose a theoretically and linguistically superior alternative based on the logarithm of odds- ratios. We contrast this scale with the current approach of the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP), showing that our proposed logit scale avoids widely acknowledged flaws in previous approaches. We validate the new scale using independent expert surveys. Using existing CMP data, we show how to estimate more distinct policy dimensions, for more years, than has been possible before, and make this dataset publicly available. Finally, we draw some conclusions about the future design of coding schemes for political texts. Y1 - 2011 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-27945 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1939-9162.2010.00006.x VL - 36 IS - 1 SP - 123 EP - 155 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Benoit, Kenneth A1 - Laver, Michael A1 - Lowe, Will A1 - Jankin, Slava T1 - How to scale coded text units without bias: A response to Gemenis JF - Electoral Studies N2 - Coding non-manifesto documents as if they were genuine policy platforms produced at election time clearly raises serious issues with error when these codings are used in the standard manner to estimate left-right policy positions. In addition to the long term solution of improving the document base of the Manifesto Project identified by Gemenis (2012), we argue that immediate gains in manifesto-based estimates of policy positions can be realised by using the confrontational logit scales from Lowe et al. (2011), which addresses the problems of scale content and scale construction that are exacerbated by but not unique to the problems found in proxy documents. Y1 - 2012 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b1570-opus4-28033 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2012.05.004 IS - 3 SP - 605 EP - 608 ET - 31 ER -