What are Voting Advice Applications?
Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are non-partisan, independent platforms designed to inform and assist citizens during electoral campaigns. They help navigating the policy proposals of competing political parties and/or candidates, with the goal of finding the best fit between individuals’ policy preferences and the proposals put forward by political parties. Users typically fill an online questionnaire indicating their positions on several policy statements (e.g. ‘social programmes should be maintained even at the cost of higher taxes’ or ’immigration should be made more restrictive’), which are then compared with parties’ stances on the same issues, producing a rank-ordered list or graph presenting users with the parties matching more closely with their policy preferences.
Our experience
The EUI has been at the forefront of VAAs for the European elections. In 2009, EU Profiler was created: the very first transnational VAA for European elections, covering all EU member states. The initiative came from Alexander H. Trechsel, at the time director of the European Democracy Observatory (EUDO, the predecessor of EGPP) and with the strong support of the late Peter Mair. The project, under the new name of euandi, continued in 2014 and 2019, when the record number of 1.28 million users was reached. For the third time after the EP elections in 2009 and 2014, this European-wide Voting Advice Application helped citizens find which party best matches their preferences in their country and across Europe. With the aim of extending the scope of the project, euandi was then replicated for a number of important national elections: the German federal elections of 2021, the French presidential elections and the Italian general elections in 2022. In 2023, the Estonian elections, were covered with an exclusive partnership with ERR, the Estonian national broadcasting company, while the Slovak voting advice application was developed in partnership with Matej Bel University in Banská Bystrica (UMB). euandi, in all its renditions, is designed in order to provide a politically neutral source of information to voters, detailing parties’ positions while explicitly not favouring any political party or group of parties. It relies on independent academic expertise, it is entirely free and can be used by all interested persons, organisations, or institutions.
The research behind
In addition to offering a useful tool to voters (and parties), euandi 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 to 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 dataset offers a significant contribution to the research on European party systems and on party positioning methodologies.
European Parliament Elections 2024
In 2024, euandi will once again be implemented for the European election, providing the European demos with an unvaluable tool to understand the political offer, particularly key in times of high polarisation and fake news, and extending further the longitudinal dataset (four waves, 2019-2024).