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This article presents a new method of reconstructing actors' political positions from coded political texts. It is based on a model that combines a dynamic perspective on actors' political positions with a probabilistic account of how these positions are translated into emphases of policy topics in political texts. In the article it is shown how model parameters can be estimated based on a maximum marginal likelihood principle and how political actors' positions can be reconstructed using empirical Bayes techniques. For this purpose, a Monte Carlo Expectation Maximization algorithm is used that employs independent sample techniques with automatic Monte Carlo sample size adjustment. An example application is given by estimating a model of an economic policy space and a noneconomic policy space based on the data from the Comparative Manifesto Project. Parties' positions in policy spaces reconstructed using these models are made publicly available for download.

The "new conventional wisdom" of a waning impact of social divisions on political choices has been subject to debate in recent years. This paper addresses the debate by assessing the relevance of parties' political positions, using a novel approach to analysing it comparatively, based on a combination of data from the Eurobarometer with data of the Comparative Manifestos Project. The findings of this paper lend support to the claim that the decline in the relation between social divisions and voting behaviour, so far as it can be observed at all, is attributable to parties' changing political positions. Once these changes are taken into account, the diagnosis of a persistent impact of social divisions prevails. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]

The "new conventional wisdom" of a waning impact of social divisions on political choices has been subject to debate in recent years. This paper addresses the debate by assessing the relevance of parties' political positions, using a novel approach to analysing it comparatively, based on a combination of data from the Eurobarometer with data of the Comparative Manifestos Project. The findings of this paper lend support to the claim that the decline in the relation between social divisions and voting behaviour, so far as it can be observed at all, is attributable to parties' changing political positions. Once these changes are taken into account, the diagnosis of a persistent impact of social divisions prevails. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]