Which social groups do political parties appeal to, and how can such appeals be compared across countries and time? This article introduces the Parties’ Social Group Appeals (PSoGA) Database, a new resource that documents which groups parties speak about and appeal to, covering manifestos from multiple Western European countries across 1970–2025. The contribution is methodological and data-focused: the authors describe dataset construction, validation, and compatibility with existing policy-focused coding projects.
Data and methods
The PSoGA Database comprises two novel datasets built from 791 election manifestos produced by 139 parties in Austria, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom between 1970 and 2025. The article outlines how the datasets were constructed and validated and reports efforts to demonstrate compatibility with policy-focused resources such as MARPOR.
Main findings
The paper does not make causal claims in the abstract but highlights the database’s scope and potential: it documents the social groups parties speak about and appeal to across space and time, offering a new empirical basis for studying representation dynamics. The authors emphasize validation and comparability with existing manifesto coding to facilitate research use.
Use and access
The abstract points readers to the dataset for researchers interested in representation and party appeals; the article provides methodological details for constructing and validating the resources and shows how they can be used alongside policy-oriented manifesto data.
Scope: 791 manifestos from 139 parties (1970–2025)
Geographic coverage: eight Western European countries
Compatibility: validated for use with MARPOR-style manifesto data
