EU Profiler/euandi trend file (2009-2019)

Abstract

The EU Profiler/euandi Trend File (2009-2019) is a dataset combining party position data from three pan-European voting advice applications (VAAs), developed for the European Parliament elections in 2009, 2014 and 2019. It includes the positions of over 400 parties from the 28 EU member states on a wide range of salient political issues. The European University Institute (EUI) launched the project first in 2009 under the name ‘EU Profiler’ in collaboration with Smartvote (Switzerland) and Kieskompas (2009). EU Profiler was succeeded by ‘euandi’ (EU and I) in 2014 and re-launched as ‘euandi2019’ five years later, in collaboration with the University of Luzern (Switzerland). The VAAs launched in 2009 and 2014 included a set of 30 political issue-statements, out of which 28 were identical for all the countries and 2 were country-specific. In 2019, the number of statements was reduced to 22 and all the items were identical across the countries. Some of the statements were changed over the years, but 15 of them remained the same since 2009. These items – pertaining to a wide range of salient topics such as social values, ecological/green policies, immigration, European integration and classic socioeconomic left-right issues – allow direct temporal comparisons and make this dataset especially valuable for longitudinal research. In addition to the variables that capture party positions on the statements, this dataset is completed by a series of additional variables. These are: an alphabetic country identifier; a numeric country identifier; the year the party was placed (2009, 2014, 2019); a “Party Unique Identifier” (PUI); the party code used by Chapel Hill Expert Survey; a dummy variable indicating whether the party participated in the self-placement process; the vote share of the party in the respective European Parliament election; and the vote share of a party coalition that the respective party was part of.