This article presents a new method for estimating positions of political parties across country- and time-specific contexts by introducing a latent variable model for manifesto data. We estimate the left-right positions of more than 388 European parties competing in 238 elections across 25 countries and over 60 years. Compared to the puzzling volatility of existing estimates, we find that parties more modestly change their left-right positions over time. We also show that estimates without country- and time-specific bias parameters risk serious, systematic bias in about two thirds of our data.