This year the euandi2019 Voting Advice Application (VAA), developed by the European University Institute and the University of Luzern, reached a record number of 1.28 million users, who completed the questionnaire before the European Parliament elections.

For the third consecutive time after the European elections in 2009 and 2014, this European-wide VAA helped citizens find which party best matches their preferences in their country as well as across Europe.

Moreover, the tool provides rich, reliable and comparable data on political parties in Europe that shows the evolution of politics in all EU Member States since 2009. Assessing the positions of political parties has long been a challenge for political scientists, and European elections bring additional difficulties because of the large number of political parties running at the same time. The euandi2019 team of 133 scientists from 28 countries managed to cover 272 political parties across 22 statements on a wide range of contemporary policy issues and political values in European politics.

The data collected over three rounds of elections across Europe will now provide scientists with comparable measures of party positions across European party systems, but also through time, revealing patterns of evolution of party positions between 2009 and 2019 in EU Member States. The academics behind the project believe this 10-year-long initiative will give the start to important high quality research in the field of European party politics. Finally, the positive trend in the application’s users can be interpreted as reflecting the higher participation by citizens in these elections, in comparison to the past rounds, which is an encouraging sign for democratic participation in the EU.

Website: https://euandi2019.eui.eu/