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Call for Papers: From Text to Political Positions 2010

January 15, 2010

9-10 April 2010, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Contact: T2PP@let.vu.nl

Details and updates on: http://www2.let.vu.nl/oz/cltl/t2pp/index.html

Plenary speakers

Kenneth Benoit (Trinity College, Dublin, Dept of Political Science)
Jan Kleinnijenhuis (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Dept of Communication Studies and The Network Institute)
Veronika Koller (Lancaster University, Dept of Linguistics and English Language) and Paul Davidson (University of Bradford, Department of Peace Studies)
Janyce Wiebe (University of Pittsburgh, Dept of Computer Science).

The workshop ‘From Text to Political Positions´ (T2PP) is intended to provide a meeting place for individual researchers and research groups focussing on the development of methods and techniques for the analysis of political texts. It will allow for dialogue between scholars working on complementary multidisciplinary projects, and so may lead to further collaboration. During these two days, plenty of time will be reserved for social and intellectual exchanges and the event will close with a round-table discussion.

The meeting will focus on comprehensive and precise methods for manual and automated analysis of subjectivity and the presentation of opinions in political texts. Examples of relevant text-types include, but are not limited to: television news broadcasts, interviews, newspapers, opinion papers, parliamentary debates, manifestos, party websites, blogs, public-opinion polls on the internet and voting polls and election results.

We plan to compile a selection of the papers and submit them to a peer-reviewed international journal for publication as a special issue.

Call for Papers

We invite 500-1000 word abstracts in English. They should be sent to T2PP@let.vu.nl

– Deadline for abstracts: 29 January 2010
– Notification of acceptance will be made by February 15th.
– Participation will be based upon acceptance of refereed abstracts.
– Only a limited number of papers (12-16) can be accepted to allow for 20 minutes per paper plus discussion time.
– Deadline for papers from accepted participants: 10 March 2010
– Accepted papers will be posted on the T2PP web site two weeks in advance as ‘working papers’ to enhance discussion and debate.

Workshop dates: 9-10 April 2010

Workshop cost: FREE – There will be no registration fee!


Topic suggestions

  • Modelling positions of actors in political texts on issues and dimensions

  • Sociological and linguistic models for deep-structure analysis of political texts

  • Linguistic evidence of popularisation of language in politics

  • Politics in the media: methods of analysis in media discourse on politics

  • Securing quality in quantitative research methods

  • Analysing political discourse from a regional (e.g., European, Asian, African, British, USA) or global perspective
  • Acquisition and representation of subjectivity and modality (emotion, deontic and epistemic modality, urgency) as expressed lexically (e.g. ‘good/bad’, ‘for/against’, ‘can/will/should/must/shall’, ‘say/state/assume/demand’, pos./neg. ‘possible/likely’) or on a higher discourse level.

  • The automatic annotation of subjective, deontic and modal layers of implications in texts to model complex opinions and positions of actors

  • Applications for political opinion mining and positioning tools

  • … other suggestions are welcome

Venue

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU University Amsterdam)
Metropolitan Building
Buitenveldertselaan 3 – 71082 VA Amsterdam
The Netherlands

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Jobs at the Comparative Manifestos Project (WZB)

June 23, 2009

The Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB), research area Civil Society, Conflicts, and Democracy, research unit Democracy: Structures, Performance, Challenges seeks four junior research fellows for the time period from 1 October 2009 until 30 September 2012 with a weekly working load of 19,5 hours in the context of the project “MARPOR Manifesto Research on Political Representation”, financed by the German Science Foundation (DFG) long-term to analyse the quality of programmatic representation across 75 countries between 1990 and 2021 based on quantitative content analyses of parties’ election programs (see http://www.wzb.eu/zkd/dsl/pdf/Marpor.pdf).

Within MARPOR, the Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP) continues its international cooperation. The DFG supports the collection and content-analyses of the manifestos to make them publicly available by financing four fellowships for tackling the following tasks:

Position 1: Organising, documenting, and preparing the primary data and secondary data on election statistics, regime types, and government compositions for publication, corresponding contribution to the scheduled book.

Position 2: Training of coders, organising the reliability tests, and further developing the coder handbook, developing and carrying out the coder interviews, preparing secondary data on party preferences, own contribution to the scheduled book on quality of primary data.

Position 3: Comparing existing and developing new measures on policy preferences of parties, collaborating in setting up and maintaining the online database for texts and content analytical data, own contribution to the scheduled book on measuring policy preferences.

Position 4: Preparing secondary data on voters and contexts, matching party and voter data, applying existing and developing new measures on congruence between parties and voters, own contribution to the scheduled book on measuring the programmatic congruence between parties and voters.

Requirements for all four positions: Applicants should hold an M.A. or corresponding degree in political science or an adjacent science with a relevant theoretical (comparative election studies, comparative party or democratic theory) or methodological focus (computerised text, micro, aggregate data, time series cross-section analysis or web-based data retrieval), good knowledge of methods of empirical social research and statistical packages as well as high capacity for teamwork. Command of the English language is a precondition for tackling the comparative tasks of the project. Knowledge of all other languages, in particular Spanish, is very welcome, command of German language is not a prerequisite.

We prefer applicants who aspire to attain their PhD on research topics central to MARPOR and who want to contribute to planned project publications.

Salary for each position: In accordance with German civil service standards (E 13 TVöD)

Disabled applicants with equal qualification will be given preference.

The WZB expressly invites women to apply.

Candidates are kindly requested to submit their application and the usual accompanying documentation no later than 31 July 2009 to:

Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB)
Dr. Andrea Volkens
Reichpietschufer 50
10785 Berlin

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ENAPT Workshop

June 7, 2009

Call for Participants

EUROPEAN NETWORK FOR THE ANALYSIS OF POLITICAL TEXT (ENAPT) WORKSHOP

Keele University (Claus Moser Research Centre, Room CM0.12)

Thursday, 25 June 2009, 9:30am-4:00pm

Download the workshop brochure from here.

The European Network for the Analysis of Political Text (ENAPT) will be organising an one-day workshop at Keele University on estimating parties’ policy positions with the use of party manifestos. The workshop will primarily discuss the methodological issues arising from a new method for coding political text which was originally proposed by Pellikaan et al. (2003) and which is currently used by a number of voting advice applications including EUprofiler.

The workshop is open to researchers interested in estimating parties’ policy positions and/or the qualitative or quantitative analysis of party manifestos. If you would like to participate, please contact Kostas Gemenis by 18 June 2009. Refreshments, lunch, and lively debate will be provided. A limited amount of travel funding for graduate students is available.

The workshop is generously supported by the Keele European Parties Research Unit (KEPRU) and the Keele University Graduate School Networking Fund.

WORKSHOP PROGRAMME

9:30-10:00 Registration and welcome

10:00-11:00 Session 1: Theory and methodology

Estimating parties’ policy positions by using the ‘confrontational’ approach: the advantages over the Comparative Manifestos Project – Kostas Gemenis (Keele)

‘The lost Atlantis of objectivity’: concerns about the reliability of measures of party manifesto data – Elias Dinas (EUI)

11:00-11:15 Coffee break

11:15-12:45 Session 2: Empirical findings from the 2004 EP election

The extreme Right in France: issues and problems in manifesto coding – Sofia Vasilopoulou (LSE) & Nathalie Brack (ULB)

Green parties in Central Europe: the cases of Austria and Germany – Zoe Lefkofridi (Vienna) & Juan Casado Asensio (Vienna)

The policy positions of parties in Great Britain and Northern Ireland – Michalis Moutselos (Oxford), Kostas Gemenis (Keele) & Pollyanna Jones (Keele)

12:45-14:00 Lunch break

14:00-15:00 Session 3: Related approaches

Referenda and party representation: the case of the Dutch EU referendum – Tom Louwerse (Leiden)

Obtaining sources and positioning parties: reflections from the EU Profiler Project – Elisabeth Carter (Keele) & Gemma Loomes (Birmingham)

15:00-15:15 Coffee break

15:15-16:00 Roundtable discussion

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