Making Political Text Scaling Comparable: Infrastructure and Hyperparameter Sensitivity for 17 Algorithms

arXiv:2609.17602v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Computational text-based ideal point estimation (CT-IPE) methods are usually compared as named algorithms, yet applying them involves numerous researcher choices that configure how political text is turned into position estimates. This paper argues that CT-IPE methods are better understood as configurable measurement pipelines than as fixed estimators. Building on a large-scale comparative experiment spanning 17 CT-IPE algorithms, 5,537 experimental runs, and approximately 4.25 million left-right position estimates, I describe the shared infrastructure that makes these heterogeneous methods jointly executable and quantify how sensitive their estimates are to alternative hyperparameter choices. Variance-partitioning and SHAP-based sensitivity analyses show that, for most algorithms, hyperparameter profiles explain little residual variance through a shared shift: 13 of the 17 algorithms exhibit ICC values below .10. Where this profile-level sensitivity is present, it is concentrated in a small number of consequential researcher choices, most notably the selection of the underlying language or embedding model, the seed keyword lists that anchor the construct, and the number of topics.