polidoc.net - The Political Documents Archive

The Political Documents Archive contains election manifestos, coalition agreements, government declarations and various other documents of political actors from developed democracies. Currently, the archive builds on a stock of more than 800 political documents from 12 Western European and North American countries. The aim of the repository is to provide political texts in order to facilitate scholarly research in different areas of comparative politics such as party competition, coalition politics, legislative decision-making or electoral behavior. The archive is freely accessible and meant to foster rigorous research in these areas by enabling scholars to produce valid and reliable findings from empirical studies of textual data rather than unnecessarily struggling to obtain and process texts.

While polidoc.net is an open access archive it also aims to establish a network for exchanging and accessing political text data once it has been checked for errors and assured for quality. The archive therefore encourages researchers to share their documents with others. We invite everybody to participate in this project so that the political science community can easily make use of already collected documents.

About the Archive

The archive is maintained by Thomas Bräuninger (University of Mannheim), Marc Debus (University of Mannheim) and Kenneth Benoit (Trinity College, University of Dublin). If data are used in publications etc. please refer to the Political Documents Archive as data source:

Kenneth Benoit, Thomas Bräuninger, and Marc Debus. 2009. “Challenges for estimating policy preferences: Announcing an open access archive of political documents.” German Politics 18(3): 440-453.

last updated: 16.09.2009Webmaster