Oleh Protsyk and Stela Garaz, "Politicization of ethnicity in party manifestos," Party Politics, 19 (March 2013), 296-318. [Available at http://ppq.sagepub.com/content/vol19/issue2/ ]

First paragraph:
Electoral manifestos of political parties have been used for estimating party positions in a large number of policy areas. The ethno-cultural dimension of party competition is not one of these areas. Having estimates of parties' positions on ethnic issues, along with estimates on other policy issues, is important both for empirical description and theoretical model-building. Such estimates help to operationalize concepts that are at the core of literature dealing with the formation and persistence of group identities, ethnic mobilization and nationalism, diversity management and power-sharing (Chandra, 2004; Gurr, 1993; Hechter, 2000; Horowitz, 1985; Olzak, 2006). These estimates are also of relevance to the general discussion on issues of party system formation and party competition in culturally heterogeneous societies (Alonso and Ruiz-Rufino, 2007; Birnir, 2007; Coakley, 2008; Lijphart, 1977). To our knowledge, there have been no systematic attempts to analyse cross-nationally whether and how political parties formulate their positions on ethnicity-related issues in party manifestos. This article is an attempt to fill this gap. It seeks to contribute substantively and methodologically to the research agenda on party manifestos.

Figures and Tables:

Table 1. Ethnicity-relevant and ethnicity-irrelevant statements in selected CMP variables.

Table 2. Examples of manifesto statements classified on the multicultural/integrationist dimension.

Table 3. Examples of multicultural statements rank-ordered by the strength of ethnic claims.

Figure 1: Distribution of ethnicity-related statements across the CMP's ethnic and non-ethnic categories

Figure 2: Salience of ethnic issues as a percentage of the total number of manifesto quasi-sentences

Figuress 3 a& b: Distribution of statements on the multicultural-integrationist dimension; Distribution of multicultural statements

Figure 4: Party positions on the multiculturalIntegrationist Dimension

Appendix I: Coding scheme of ethno-cultural domain

Last Paragraph:
As our findings indicate, ethno-cultural issues are more politically salient than the CMP estimates suggest. Many parties that operate in ethnically diverse societies are forced to take a position on ethno-cultural issues. Party manifesto analysis can help to structure inquiry on such position-taking and can improve our general understanding of how ethnic issues become politicized. At the moment, party manifesto analysis remains a severely underutilized tool by students of ethnic politics and we hope that the approach we propose can contribute to changing this situation.