This book is probably the most important source of evidence published up to now on the consolidation of democracy in Eastern Europe. It provides estimates of party positions, voter preferences and government policy from election programmes collected systematically for 51 countries from 1990 onwards. Time-series are presented in the text. This also reports party life histories (essential to over time analyses) and provides updated and newly validated vote statistics. All this information and much more is available on the devoted website described in the book. The final chapter gives instructions on how to access the data on your own computer. For comparative purposes, similar estimates of policy and preferences are given for CEE, OECD and EU countries. These estimates update the prize-winning data set covered in Mapping Policy Preferences: Estimates for Parties, Electors and Governments 1945-1998 - also published by OUP. A must-buy for all commentators, students and analysts of democracy, in Eastern Europe and the world.

This unique book contains the only set of statistical estimates of party, government, and electoral preferences in 25 countries over the entire post-war period. These are based on content analyses of electoral and government programs for each election and government of the period, a task which no one else has even attempted. It provides these estimates directly for computer use on the CD ROM provided with it. The printed text provides documentation and suggests uses for data, along with much other background information.