When Parties (Also) Position Themselves: An Introduction to the EU Profiler

Abstract

This article frames and describes a novel method of political party positioning within the European Union and beyond. The EU Profiler project, a large-scale, interdisciplinary, and pan-European research endeavor, takes a step beyond the conventional approaches by including party self-positioning and by using internet-based information technology to offer full documentation of the positions that are identified. In addition to conventional expert coding, some 270 political parties in Europe have been invited to place themselves on 30 issue dimensions. Where it proved possible, each coded position for each party is then fully documented with extracts from party manifestos, party leaders' speeches, or relevant press or policy statements. The resulting data offer unique opportunities for comparing the accuracy and efficiency among party positioning techniques, and explore for the first time and in a systematic way the auto-positioning of political parties throughout Europe.

Matching voters to parties: Voting advice applications and models of party choice

“…This means that VAAs fulfil their aim of matching voters to parties well, especially if we focus on left-right congruence between voter and party positions. As a side benefit, the convergent validity of the VAA scores means that data from these applications could be used to provide election-specific party placement information, especially if the VAA is created by a trustworthy provider (for a similar argument, see Trechsel and Mair, 2011). However, VAAs are less able to establish clear party positions on issues that are less central to the political debate, as the detail and thus accuracy of party placements at least partly depends on the number of questions asked on each topic.…”

“…These VAAs were online between 2002 and 2009 and represent all the national-level VAAs from which we were able to encode party placements during the data collection period in March-April 2010. Although we focus on national-level VAAs in order to ensure comparability with expert survey and manifesto data, there is also an increasing number of VAAs at the European level (for example, the EUProfiler, Trechsel and Mair, 2011) and at the sub-national level (for example, the Wahl-O-Mat and Wahlkabine in German and Austrian La¨nder, respectively). The popularity of VAAs also means that more such applications are constantly being added.…”

“…VAA providers are usually either political education agencies, as in Germany and the Netherlands, or media corporations, as in Finland and Belgium. Other VAAs have been developed by teams of political scientists as in Switzerland and in the case of the EU Profiler (Trechsel and Mair, 2011), by civil society organisations and by interest groups.…”

Estimating parties’ policy positions through voting advice applications: Some methodological considerations

“…As far as I know, VAAs do not routinely report intercoder reliability. EU Profiler, for instance, relies on 'discussions among team members' and consultations with experts and the VAA leadership (Trechsel and Mair, 2011). However, making decisions by consensus among the VAA team members does not guarantee coding reliability.…”

Questão Pública: First Voting Advice Application in Latin America

“…In most cases VAAs are advertised as reliable tools capable of aiding voters to make informed decisions, enhancing and strengthening fundamental democratic principles such as transparency and accountability [3], but also as a means to have a positive effect on voter turnout. More recently, researchers are trying to use VAA generated data to analyze the positioning of political parties in an ideological space [4].…”