Local politics remains underexplored despite its importance in policymaking and methodological advantages for comparative research. This paper examines the role of party ideology in local politics by analyzing party manifestos for local council elections.

Local politics is frequently considered unideological compared to higher government levels; however, this study challenges that notion by analyzing ideological polarization and party influence through the lens of municipal council election manifestos. Drawing on a novel and still-growing dataset of over 350 local manifestos from Germany, I leverage text analysis techniques to scale and classify the political positions of local political parties. A key focus is on whether intracommunity variance (differences in ideology within a single municipality) outweighs intraparty variance (differences across municipalities within the same party), shedding light on the extent to which local politics is shaped by overarching party structures versus locally important policy issues. Although preliminary findings show a stronger focus on local issues than ideology in local manifestos, I still find pronounced ideological distinctions among parties, suggesting that local politics is more ideologically driven than often assumed.

The paper contributes to the literature on political polarization and multi-level party organization. It further contributes to the quantitative text analysis literature as it requires scaling and comparing political texts with different qualities, lengths, and degrees of professionalism. This paper and specifically the provided manifestos bear many opportunities for future local or multi-level research.