Laver & Garry Dictionary of Policy Position – (FREE)

Download and Installation Instruction

1. Click here to download the dictionary
2. Extract the content of the zip file into the WordStat Dictionary folder (by default: My Documents\My Provalis Research Projects\Dictionaries).

To obtain information on WordStat content analysis software or download a trial version, click here.

Dictionary Information

Description – The Laver & Garry dictionary has been developed to estimates the policy positions of political actors in the United Kingdom by comparing their speeches and written documents to keywords found in the British conservative and Labour manifestos of 1992. Words have been selected semantically based on how they were related to specific content categories as well as empirically based on how specific they were to a specific political party (a word should be used by one party at least twice as often as by the other party). The dictionary contains 415 words and word patterns stored in 19 categories.

Note: Please remember that this dictionary was customized to reflect the policy positions of UK political parties. It has limited utility to assess political documents from other countries. The procedure outline in Laver & Gary (2000) could, however, be used to adapt the dictionary to a different political context.

Main reference: (to be cited in all publications which make use of it)

Laver. M. & Garry, J. (2000). Estimating Policy Positions from Political Texts. American Journal of Political Science, 44 (3), 619-634.