A new, scalable measure of party ideology uses the descriptive tags found in political parties' Wikipedia infoboxes. By treating those tags as signals under a simple tag-assignment model, the approach places both parties and ideology labels in a shared spatial scale.

🗂️ How party positions were inferred

• Data source: ideology tags supplied in infoboxes on political parties' Wikipedia pages.
• Modeling approach: a simple model of tag assignment is used to scale tags and estimate the locations of parties and ideologies in a common space.

🔎 What the evidence shows

• The recovered scale maps cleanly onto familiar left–right distinctions.
• Estimated party positions correlate well with ratings from existing large-scale expert surveys, with the strongest alignment to general left–right ideology ratings.
• Party position estimates demonstrate high stability in a test–retest scenario.

📈 Why this matters

• The Wikipedia-based measure produces valid and reliable left–right scores that are comparable to scores obtained via conventional expert coding methods.
• The technique offers potentially unlimited party coverage and a measurement strategy that can be applied beyond Wikipedia to other tag-based sources.