The Local Manifesto Project (LMP) collects and analyzes parties’ electoral manifestos to gain new insights into the structure and dynamics of local party competition. Our work is inspired by similar projects which have analyzed party manifestos at the national and regional level. Analyzing local party manifestos is particularly important as we lack systematic and comparable information about party competition at the local level. The analysis of local party manifestos can be a solution to this lack of data.
On this webpage you can access and directly analyze the current text corpus. We have collected more than 800 local party manifestos from local elections in Germany. Some of these manifestos date back to 1990, but most manifestos come from elections in the 2000s. Moreover all manifestos come from large cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants. The text corpus will be constantly updated as new manifestos are collected for each upcoming local election.
On this webpage we provide access to the raw data as well as a link to an R Shiny App which allows you to analyze the data in your webbrowser.
To download the data please follow these links:
Download all local party manifestos (in .txt format, utf8 encoding) (.zip)
Download all local coalition agreements (in .txt format, utf8 encoding) (.zip)
To access the Shiny App, please follow this link: LMP Shiny App
The LMP is work in progress. The links above provide you access to the raw data. We are currently working on providing meta information on the manifestos and cities. We are also working on collecting more manifestos from recent local elections in Germany.
We recommend using the R packages readtext and quanteda for reading in and analyzing the manifestos.
Currently, the LMP only covers local party manifestos from large cities in Germany. If you have access to other local manifestos we would be happy to hear from you and discuss potential collaborations.
When using data from the LMP, please use the following reference for citation:
Gross, Martin and Michael Jankowski. Forthcoming. Dimensions of Political Conflict and Party Positions in Multi-Level Democracies: Evidence from the Local Manifesto Project. West European Politics.
The LMP is a project of Martin Gross (LMU Munich) and Michael Jankowski (University of Oldenburg). You can contact us directly via: contact@localpartymanifestos.de.