Introducing the Parties’ Social Group Appeals (PSoGA) Database

Séminaire/webinaire de l'axe Partis, Élections et Représentation with Alona Dolinsky, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam - GAPREP Project.

Abstract

During the presentation I will be introducing the Parties' Social Group Appeals (PSoGA) database, a novel resource that tracks which social groups political parties apepal to in their election manifestos. Despite being central to electoral studies, our understanding of these group appeals has been limited by a lack of comprehensive comparative data.

The PSoGA database fills this critical gap through two complementary datasets:

• A sentence-level dataset capturing fine-grade information on appeals within manifestos
• A document-level dataset providing aggregate patterns across entire manifestos

Together, these datasets cover an unprecedented scope: 865 election manifestos from 155 political parties across eight European democracies (Austria, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK) spanning from 1970 to 2024.

In this presentation, I will:

1. Outline our rigorous methodology for constructing and validating both datasets
2. Demonstrate how PSoGA integrates with established policy-focused resources like MARPOR and CAP
3. Highlight patterns in party appeals to various socio-demographic groups
4. Present specific examples showing how these appeals vary across countries, time periods, and party families

This new resource opens exciting research avenues in multiple fields, including electoral behavior, representation studies, gender politics, political communication, and party competition. By systematically documenting which socio-demographic groups receive attention from political parties, PSoGA provides researchers with unprecedented insight into representation dynamics across time and political systems.