An iterative expert survey approach for estimating parties’ policy positions

This article introduces the iterative expert survey approach in estimating parties’ policy positions. Methodologically, the proposed approach is based on the tradition of ‘judgemental’ coding in the content analysis of political text, and incorporates the idea of anonymous iteration among a panel of expert coders taken from the method known as ‘Delphi’. Anonymous iteration presents an effective way of reducing the random error, and potential bias arising from inter-expert/coder disagreement evident in other popular methods. I provide an empirical demonstration of the approach by estimating parties’ policy positions in the context of a voting advice application in Germany, and argue that the method has considerable potential to generate valid and reliable data on party positions cross-nationally and retrospectively.