1 Unpacking the Italian puzzle and what we can learn from it: using Party Manifesto Data on “unfriendly” territory Luigi Curini Università degli Studi di Milano - do not quote without author’s permission – - Abstract Left-Right scores generated through Party Manifesto Data (PMD) do not do a very good job in the Italian case, providing a rather distorted picture of its party system. We will show how PMD can still be used to assess Italian party positions once two modifications are introduced. First, through investigation of the scalability of the Manifesto scale, we highlight some peculiarities related to the origins of the modern Italian political system that would otherwise be overlooked. This finding has important consequences for the categories used to create a left-right scale as well as for the weight assigned to each of them. Second, building on some recent critiques, we emphasise the need to differentiate between the manifesto score for a party and its positional value and propose a method to deal with this. We will assess our left-right scores according to their relationship with two sets of survey-based measures of party positions and to the theory of the median voter. The lessons that we can draw from the Italian case about the most appropriate way to use (and analyze) PMD are highlighted. In particular, researchers interested in employing them for investigating a single country, as opposed to conducting a comparative analysis, should not overlook contextual details. Keywords: left-right classification; Italy; party system; content analysis; median voter theory