# Additive manifesto decomposition: A policy domain aware method for understanding party positioning

Source: [Additive manifesto decomposition: A policy domain aware method for understanding party positioning](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa6f521e209131cea4501e>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2026-01-01T17:04:02.487Z

Authors: Tanise Ceron, Dmitry Nikolaev, Sebastian Pad\\'o

Published: 2023-05-17T11:39:31.000Z

## Abstract

Automatic extraction of party (dis)similarities from texts such as party election manifestos or parliamentary speeches plays an increasing role in computational political science. However, existing approaches are fundamentally limited to targeting only global party (dis)-similarity: they condense the relationship between a pair of parties into a single figure, their similarity. In aggregating over all policy domains (e.g., health or foreign policy), they do not provide any qualitative insights into which domains parties agree or disagree on. This paper proposes a workflow for estimating policy domain aware party similarity that overcomes this limitation. The workflow covers (a) definition of suitable policy domains; (b) automatic labeling of domains, if no manual labels are available; (c) computation of domain-level similarities and aggregation at a global level; (d) extraction of interpretable party positions on major policy axes via multidimensional scaling. We evaluate our workflow on manifestos from the German federal elections. We find that our method (a) yields high correlation when predicting party similarity at a global level and (b) provides accurate party-specific positions, even with automatically labelled policy domains.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

- [Party distance correlation analysis on German manifestos (Predicted)](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/party-distance-correlation-analysis-on-german-manifestos-predicted.md>): Party distance correlation analysis; German manifestos (Predicted); Rile (r): 0.79.

- [Party distance correlation analysis on German manifestos (Annotated)](<https://www.sota2.com/research/sota/party-distance-correlation-analysis-on-german-manifestos-annotated.md>): Party distance correlation analysis; German manifestos (Annotated); Rile Correlation (r): 0.87.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.10136>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.10136.pdf>)

[Implementation](<https://github.com/tceron/additive_manifesto_decomposition>)