The structure of political conflict varies across Western Europe. Although the same general ideological dimensions structure politics in different contexts, which concrete policy issues are politicized relative to these dimensions—and in what degree—differs. We examine the associations between parties’ issue preferences and the underlying latent dimensions to assess how (dis)similar the meanings of political spaces are across Western European democracies. We do so by drawing on the expert-level responses of the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) and a novel hierarchical Bayesian item response model that introduces variation across space in item parameters. Substantively, this allows us to (1) describe how similar countries’ political spaces are and how well specific issues travel across contexts, and (2) explore both structural and agent-based explanations for the (dis)similarity of Western European political spaces. This study has fundamental implications for our understanding of political ideology and party competition.