Five leading German political parties and their coalitions are evaluated with regard to party manifestos and results of the 2005 parliamentary elections. For this purpose, the party manifestos are converted into Yes/No answers to 95 topical questions (Relax the protection against dismissals?...

Conventional wisdom holds that ethnicity provides the social cleavage for voting behav-iour and party affiliation in Africa. Because this is usually inferred from aggregate data of national election results, it might prove to be an ecological fallacy. The evidence based on individual data from...

Despite a growing interest in African political parties, no comparative analyses of political ideology in Africa have been undertaken to date. This study addresses this shortcoming by applying the Manifesto Research Group's (MRG) coding scheme to a complete set of African party manifestos in...