Current party estimates provide for little variation across policy areas and over time. In response, we propose to relate the issue-specific ideological preference profiles of political parties to the legislative context. For the dimensional representation of policy positions of political parties our procedure weights the issue-specific preference profiles by their prominence on the agenda of each policy area. We apply this procedure to EU legislation and locate national political parties on a national/supranational and left/right dimension, which can be used for the analysis of Council decision-making.