Mapping parties in a multidimensional European political space : a comparative study of the EUvox and euandi party position data sets

Abstract

This study compares the spatial positioning of over 200 political parties across 28 European Union (EU) member states in two cross-national voting advice applications (VAAs) developed for the 2014 European elections: EUvox and euandi. We find that the two VAAs show highly similar results in terms of party positioning on the cultural liberal-conservative and pro-anti EU dimensions, while economic left–right placements converge less, especially concerning right-wing parties. Our analyses reveal that the higher overlap on the cultural and EU dimensions is a result, at least partially, of the inclusion of similar items used to measure these concepts, while most of the systematic divergence between the two VAAs in left–right placements stems from problematic issue-statements used in the dimensional calculations. We demonstrate how certain items can cause bias in the placements of specific party families by (1) not aligning with other statements that measure the same latent construct; (2) tapping into other latent constructs, in addition to the one they are supposed to measure; and (3) not inducing sufficient polarization between parties.