Polidoc.net CODEBOOK: National and Regional Manifestos and other Political Documents Collected for the Research Projects "Representation in Europe: Congruence between Preferences of Elites and Voters" (REPCONG) and "The Impact of EU Cohesion Policy on European Identification" (COHESIFY) (Q5676)

The Political Documents Archive http://www.polidoc.net/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 3000 political documents from 20 European 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. National electoral manifestos have been collected in the course of the REPCONG project (Representation in Europe: Policy Congruence between Citizens and Elites), and the archive includes party manifestos for regional elections in several European democracies. Because the process of European integration resulted in a strengthening of regions in EU member states and in countries that want to join the European Union, the relevance of the regional level for political decision-making has increased during the last decades. Therefore, also the policy profiles of regional parties are required to get a full picture of democratic responsiveness in European states across all levels of the political system. The collection of regional manifestos was supported by the COHESIFY project (www.cohesify.eu), funded under the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Innovation. The aim of COHESIFY is to study whether the European Structural and Investment Funds affect peoples support for and identification with the European project. The archive is freely accessible (after a simple registration) 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.