Kick-Starting Government Action against Climate Change: Effective Political Strategies (Routledge, 2021)
Ian has pioneered the use of quantitative methods in studying party democracy across countries.
He is perhaps best known as convenor of the Manifesto Research Group (now MARPOR at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin) which pioneered the content analysis of party manifestos across 45 post-war democracies.
This has given rise to the widely used Left-Right scale used to trace party policy shifts over time and comparatively.
Publications from this research include Ian Budge et al., Ideology, Strategy and Party Change (1987, 2008), Ian Budge et al., ‘Ideology, party factionalism and policy change: An integrated dynamic theory’ (British Journal of Political Science 40, 2010, 781-804), and Ian Budge (with various authors), Mapping Policy Preferences (2001, 2006, 2013: winner of the American Political Science Association Award, 2003).
Ian has also pioneered other areas of political research, anticipating the autonomous development of Scottish politics in Scottish Political Behaviour (1966) with Derek Urwin, developments in voting behaviour in Party Identification and Beyond (1976) ed. with Ivor Crewe and Dennis Farlie, the saliency theory of party competition (with Farlie) in Explaining and Predicting Elections (1983) and developments in direct democracy in The New Challenge of Direct Democracy (1996).
A citation written by an international jury for his European Achievement Award (2013) noted his ‘outstanding contribution to European political science…through international research projects…scholarly production and institutional service’.
