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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.10136 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10136/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.04606/) (2016)
- [Whitening Sentence Representations for Better Semantics and Faster Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15316/) (2021)
- [Optimizing text representations to capture (dis)similarity between political parties](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11989/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Beyond prompt brittleness: Evaluating the reliability and consistency of political worldviews in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17649/) (2024)
- [Multilingual estimation of political-party positioning: From label aggregation to long-input Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12575/) (2023)
- [Toeing the Party Line: Election Manifestos as a Key to Understand Political Discourse on Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15743/) (2024)
- [Strategies for political-statement segmentation and labelling in unstructured text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07179/) (2025)
- [Comparing Architectures for Supervised Political Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01464/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.