Extracting party positions from election manifestos is a well-established procedure in comparative
political science research. The potential of analyzing local party manifestos, however, is yet to be
explored. In this article, we argue that local party manifestos offer a fruitful source for research but
impose certain methodological challenges. We discuss these challenges and address three research
questions. First, can local party manifestos be used to extract meaningful party positions? Second,
how does the choice of different methods for text-scaling affect the results? Third, how can these
estimates be used in political research? By analyzing more than 400 local party manifestos at the
local level in Germany, the answer to the first question is clearly yes. We find, however, substantive
differences in the results produced by supervised and unsupervised methods. Finally, we outline
how these estimates can be used to explain local party competition.
