ADRN

political parties, manifesto coding, political ideology, Hong Kong, hybrid regime

This study provides a new dataset on the ideological positions of political parties in Hong Kong, which is a hybrid regime with electoral elements. Using this dataset, the study challenges the non-ideological view of party competition in Hong Kong by identifying an ideological dimension to the elections held between 1998 and 2016. It is shown that parties do position themselves along an identifiable left–right spectrum, with shifts that can be meaningfully interpreted, and that the aggregate ideology of the electorate appears to be linked to the level of economic growth. The ideological dimension provides a novel perspective on local politics that looks beyond the dominant pro-democracy versus pro-Beijing divide while also shedding light on the recent changes underlying the latter. This study provides valuable objective data for analyzing political competition dynamics and contributes to the comparative literature by incorporating Hong Kong into the framework of the manifesto coding project.

Mathew Y.H. Wong (myhwong@eduhk.hk) is Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Sciences at the Education University of Hong Kong. His research interests include income inequality, comparative politics and political economy, and politics of East Asia. He has published in journals such as the Democratization, Government and Opposition, and PS: Political Science & Politics. He is also the author of the book Comparative Hong Kong Politics.