Wordfish Scaling

Wordfish scaling is an unsupervised text-as-data method that estimates a single latent position for each political document — a party manifesto, a legislative speech, a press release — directly from its word frequencies, without any reference texts or hand coding. Introduced by Slapin and Proksch in 2008, it models word counts as draws from a Poisson distribution whose rate depends on a document position and word-specific parameters, recovering, for example, a left–right ordering of parties purely from how often each word appears in each text.