Tell Me What You Watch or Read and I'll Tell You What You Think. Computing Comparable Ideological Profiles for 400+ Newspapers and TV Channels in 15 Western European Countries

Students in political behavior routinely compare voters ideological self-placement and party positions to test their propositions. This procedure is most likely undermined my the fact that individuals' perceptions of where parties stand are affected by their own positions. Moreover, it is also customarily to compare ideological placements across parties, assuming that a common ideological center. These two assumptions are unjustified. A Bayesian Aldrich-McKelvey algorithm is introduced to estimate (and correct) for individual and country-specific distortions in the ideological scale. Comparable ideal points are estimated within a European common space in two dimensions. An applications of this measure reveals the ideological profile of European traditional media.