VOTING ADVICE APPLICATIONS FOR THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT ELECTIONS, 2009-2024
Local Coordinator: Diego Garzia
Other Members: Alvaro Canalejo-Molero (University of Lucerne), Lorenzo Cicchi (European University Institute), Frederico Ferreira da Silva (University of Lisbon), Andres Reiljan (University of Tartu), Alexander H. Trechsel (University of Lucerne)
Abstract: The EU&I Voting Advice Application (VAA) represents a means for voters to gain an unobstructed view of the European political space, and their place within it. This space is defined by the policies of the parties competing in the European Parliament (EP) elections. EU&I provides users a political profile based on their responses to a list of 30 policy statements. Users can react to each issue statement by stating their level of agreement on a standard five-point scale ranging from ‘completely agree’ to ‘completely disagree’ plus a ‘no opinion’ option. The tool then uses a mathematic algorithm to match the user’s preferences with the parties’ positions on the same issue statements.
To determine their positions on the statements, political parties are given the opportunity to provide their self-placement. The EU&I team contacts the parties inviting them to fill in a questionnaire and motivating their choices by supplying supporting material. In parallel, the country expert teams proceed to code parties’ positions independently of the parties. Our experts are also asked to specify what documentation they had used to place parties. They are invited to use seven types of sources hierarchically ordered – the top being the party’s current EP election manifesto. In instances where the party has not released any, the researchers refer to other party manifestos, party websites, statements in the media and other secondary sources. When the party self-placement and the expert coding are completed, the two results are compared. Where there are discrepancies, the party is asked to provide more support for its declared position, and a final answer is identified. Where parties decline the invitation, country teams take care of positioning the parties based on the available documentation.
In addition to offering a useful tool to voters (and parties), EU&I produces highly relevant scientific data for researchers and practitioners interested in political parties and elections, which is regularly made available to the academic community, in full compliance with privacy standards. In particular, the “EU Profiler/euandi trend file (2009–2019)“dataset compiles party position data from three consecutive pan-European Voting Advice Applications (VAAs), developed by the European University Institute for the European Parliament elections in 2009, 2014 and 2019. It includes the positions of 411 parties from 28 European countries on a wide range of salient political issues. Altogether, the dataset contains more than 20,000 unique party positions. To place the parties on the political issues, all three editions of the VAA have used the same iterative method that combines party self-placement and expert judgement. The data collection has been a collective effort of several hundreds of highly trained social scientists, involving experts from each EU member state. The political statements that the parties were placed on, were identical across all the countries and 15 of the statements remained the same throughout all three waves (2009, 2014, 2019) of data collection. Because of the unique methodology and the large volume of data, the datasets offer a significant contribution to the research on European party systems and on party positioning methodologies.
The EU&I-generated datasets are publicly available for research at the links below:
- EU Profiler (2009) - party data (download) and user data (download)
- euandi (2014) - party and user data (download)
- euandi2019 - party and user data (download)
- EU Profiler/euandi trend file (2009-2019) – party data (download)
Project period: 2009-present
Website: www.euandi.eu