The Latent Semantic Scaling (LSS) not only works well with positive-negative sentiment but with left-right position on economic policy. The seed words for this dimension are {deficit, austerity, unstable, recession, inflation, currency, workforce} for the light and {poor, poverty, free, benefits, prices, money, workers} for the left.
Left-right policy position dictionary was created from UK and Irish news corpus from 1996-1997. The first chart is the replication of the Wordscore paper by Benoit and Laver, and black and red letters represent Irish and UK parties.
The second chart is the result of the machine coding of UK party manifestos from 1987 to 2010 by the same dictionary, and it is showing clear separation of the leftist and rightist parties until 2005. Why there is not difference between the three parties in the 2010? It is arguably because their economic policy became very similar after the economic crisis from the perspective of 1990s politics.
