Study title

Full edition for scientific use. The dataset “AUTNES Content Analysis of Party Websites 2013” covers all party websites of parties gaining at least two percent of the votes in the 2013 national election. The party websites were saved each day during the six weeks prior to the general election in 2013. The coding units are graphical or textual elements on the website. The coding procedure applies the AUTNES relational approach of recording subjects, predicates, and objects to party websites. The subject is the party that operates the website. There are two types of objects: issues and object actors. Coders record issues by selecting from the AUTNES issue coding scheme the dominant policy issue and the dominant campaign issue in the coding unit. The issue predicate numerically records whether the subject’s position towards the policy issue is one of support, rejection, or conveys a neutral/ambivalent stance. Up to ten object actors are recorded from each coding unit, each with their name (if an individual is present) and organisational affiliation, as well as the evaluation by the subject actor (positive, negative or neutral) and appearance in the coding unit (text only, text and image, image only). In addition to the basic subject–predicate–object structure we code several additional variables: character traits and party records for all actors, and justifications for issue statements. Also, the dataset contains variables describing the website, the coding units and images visible on the website. List of variables: ID, coder-ID; variables referring to the homepage: URL; type of homepage (party homepage); date and time of saving; variables referring to the coding unit: unit-ID; number of days a unit was online; new unit (unit is online for the first time); visible on a screen of standard size when opening the homepage; category (start picture, head, menu, news, policies, campaign, schedule, twitterwall, facebook, blogs); continuous text; picture; video; variables...