Abstract
This paper surveys the various methodologies for estimating policy positions of political actors, and speculates on the current state and the future development prospects of these methodologies in the Japanese context. Above methodologies can be largely divided into two: text analysis of policy documents and questionnaire survey. Text analysis has its advantage over surveys in that it allows objective extraction of political issues. However, there is a room for improvement in terms of the analysis cost and the reliability of the result, since the process is executed by human coders. In order to counter these problems, we propose the computerized coding scheme. We demonstrate the effectiveness and the potential of this methodology by applying it to the manifestoes of political parties in the national elections in year 2005 and 2007.
