EU&I: Research and impact through European-wide and national Voting Advice Applications

Introduction

The EU&I Voting Advice Application (VAA) provides voters with 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 with 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 mathematical 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 self-place. The EU&I team contacts the parties, inviting them to complete a questionnaire and motivating their choices by providing 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 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 the parties were placed on were identical across all countries, and 15 of the statements remained the same across 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. 

Team

Lorenzo Cicchi (European University Institute)

Álvaro Canalejo-Molero (University of Lucerne)

Frederico Ferreira da Silva (University of Lisbon)

Diego Garzia (University of Bologna)

Andres Reiljan (University of Tartu)

Alexander H. Trechsel (University of Lucerne)

Research based on our data

The EU&I-generated datasets are publicly available for research at the links below, together with the project description papers; the subsequent bibliography lists peer-reviewed articles, dataset papers, and selected working papers that directly use data from the pan-European Voting Advice Applications developed at the European University Institute, as well as the national spin-offs that were deployed since 2019: EU Profiler (2009), euandi (2014), euandi2019 (2019) and EU&I (2024); German federal elections (2021), French presidential elctions (2022), Italian parliamentary elections (2022), Estonian parliamentary elections (2023), Slovak parliamentary elections (2023).

Datasets

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) 

EU&I (2024) – party and user data (download)

Project description papers

Garzia, D., Trechsel, A. H., De Sio, L., & De Angelis, A. (2015). euandi: Project description and datasets documentation. European University Institute, EUDO – European Union Democracy Observatory Working Paper https://cadmus.eui.eu/entities/publication/3dda6eb5-3336-522c-9119-d1ebeb9b3133

Michel, E., Cicchi, L., Garzia, D., Ferreira da Silva, F., & Trechsel, A. H. (2019). euandi2019: Project description and datasets documentation (EUI Working Paper RSCAS 2019/61). European University Institute, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies. https://cadmus.eui.eu/entities/publication/f356f122-ce72-5d24-afb7-8ff5f6d92262

Cicchi, L., Reiljan, A., Canalejo-Molero, Á., Ferreira da Silva, F., Garzia, D., & Trechsel, A. H. (forthcoming). EU&I 2024: Project description and dataset documentation. EUI Working Paper, European University Institute, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies.

Peer-reviewed articles and other working papers

Alvarez, R. M., Levin, I., Mair, P., & Trechsel, A. H. (2014). Party preferences in the digital age: The impact of voting advice applications. Party Politics, 20(2), 227–236. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354068813519960

Bright, J., Garzia, D., Lacey, J., & Trechsel, A. H. (2016). Europe’s voting space and the problem of second-order elections: A transnational proposal. European Union Politics, 17(1), 184–198. https://doi.org/10.1177/1465116515607372

Chalkidis, I. (2024). Investigating LLMs as voting assistants via contextual augmentation: A case study on the European Parliament elections 2024 (arXiv:2407.08495). https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.08495

Chalkidis, I., & Brandl, S. (2024). Llama meets EU: Investigating the European political spectrum through the lens of LLMs. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL). Mexico City, Mexico.

Cicchi, L., Bardi, L., Calossi, E., & Masi, B. (2026). Measuring political representation in Italy: A VAA-based analysis of the 2022 election. Contemporary Italian Politics, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/23248823.2026.2629096

Cicchi, L., Garzia, D., & Trechsel, A. H. (2020). Mapping parties’ positions on foreign and security issues in the EU, 2009–2014. Foreign Policy Analysis, 16(4), 532–546. https://doi.org/10.1093/fpa/oraa014

Dinas, E., Trechsel, A. H., & Vassil, K. (2014). A look into the mirror: Preferences, representation and electoral participation. Electoral Studies, 36, 290–297. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2014.04.011

Drews, W., Riedl, J., & Steup, J. (2025). Topical Negative Campaigning Under Spatial Pressure: Party-Level Strategies for Attacks Across Multiple Issues. German Politics, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644008.2025.2561584

Ferreira da Silva, F., Reiljan, A., Cicchi, L., Trechsel, A. H., & Garzia, D. (2023). Three sides of the same coin? Comparing party positions in VAAs, expert surveys and manifesto data. Journal of European Public Policy, 30(1), 150–173. https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2021.1981982

Freudlsperger, C., & Weinrich, M. (2025). Varieties of pro-Europeanism? How mainstream parties compete over redistribution in the European Union. European Journal of Political Research, 64(4), 1618–1642. https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6765.12753

Garzia, D., Trechsel, A. H., & De Sio, L. (2017). Party placement in supranational elections: An introduction to the euandi 2014 dataset. Party Politics, 23(4), 333–341. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354068815593456

Huijsmans, T., & Krouwel, A. (2021). Party competition over EU integration: Asymmetrical impacts of external shocks across regions? European Political Science Review, 13(4), 547–566. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1755773921000242

Lefkofridi, Z., & Katsanidou, A. (2018). A step closer to a transnational party system? Competition and coherence in the 2009 and 2014 European Parliament. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, 56(6), 1462–1482. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.12755

McDonnell, D., & Werner, A. (2019). Differently Eurosceptic: Radical right populist parties and their supporters. Journal of European Public Policy, 26(12), 1761–1778. https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2018.1561743

Mintal, J. M., Butzlaff, F., Hamrak, B., Vancel, R., & Borseková, K. The paradox of representation: How identity fragmentation complicates voter-party congruence. European Journal of Political Research. Published online 2026:1-19. http://doi.org/doi:10.1017/S1475676526101200 

Mintal, J. M., Borseková, L., Cicchi, L., Müller, V., Vancel, R., Šimková, P., & Deegan-Krause, K. (2024). “The Volebny Kompas Datasets on Slovak Voter and Party Positions”, Nature Sci Data 11, 960. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-024-03777-0

Popp, R. (2025). Harmony and dissonance: Unveiling issue linkages between voters and parties across EU democracies. Party Politics, 31(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/13540688231221650

Reiljan, A., Cicchi, L., Garzia, D., Ferreira da Silva, F., & Trechsel, A. H. (2023). Party placement in the void: The European political space in 10 years of cross-national Voting Advice Applications (EUI RSC Working Paper 2023/20, European Governance and Politics Programme). European University Institute https://cadmus.eui.eu/entities/publication/ca184953-fc4c-5e6f-9bd7-d1502d2aa6f3

Reiljan, A., Ferreira da Silva, F., Cicchi, L., Garzia, D., & Trechsel, A. H. (2020). Longitudinal dataset of political issue-positions of 411 parties across 28 European countries (2009–2019) from voting advice applications EU Profiler and euandi. Data in Brief, 31, 105968. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dib.2020.105968

Reiljan, A., Kutiyski, Y., & Krouwel, A. (2020). Mapping parties in a multidimensional European political space: A comparative study of the EUvox and euandi party position data sets. Party Politics, 26(3), 285–300. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354068818812209

Telle, S., de Blok, L., de Vries, C. E., & Cicchi, L. (2022). Elite-mass linkages in the preference formation on differentiated integration. JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, 60(6), 1663–1683. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.13339

Trechsel, A. H., & Mair, P. (2011). When parties (also) position themselves: An introduction to the EU Profiler. Journal of Information Technology and Politics, 8(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2011.533533

EU&I 2024 report: research and communications behind the 2024 Voting Advice Application