Party placement in the void : the European political space in 10 years of cross-national voting advice applications

Abstract

With this paper, we pay tribute to Peter Mair by looking back at the three waves (2009, 2014, 2019) of the pan-European Voting Advice Application (VAA) EU Profiler/euandi – a project in which Peter Mair had a very crucial role in its early years. We describe the unique standing of the EU Profiler/euandi in the VAA landscape and take an analytical look at the central elements of this tool. We show the project has been innovative in many ways, such as: a) in 2014 and 2019, more than half of the over 200 parties included in the project took part in the self-placement procedure, showing great interest towards the pan-European VAA; b) the EU Profiler/euandi team has managed to apply a common set of issue-statements to the whole EU and find the topics that are both salient (on most statements, more than 80% of the parties have been coded to have a distinguishable position) and polarize between parties (in a large majority of issues, there is a considerable share of parties on both sides of the centrepoint of the scale); c) the party placements on the central dimensions of the political space show high external validity with other prominent methods of party placement. At the same time, we reveal worrisome regional divergences, as the post-communist countries are less likely to co-operate with the VAA in self-placing themselves, have more parties that are left uncoded on many issues, and party positions in this region show less convergence with other methods. Also, when studying issue polarization at the European level, we demonstrate that party positions are often determined rather by the regional than ideological affiliation of the parties, raising some questions about whether and to what extent can we even talk about common EU political space. In the end of the paper, we present the data from the German euandi2021, one of the national stepping stones towards improving the VAA for the 2024 European edition. The paper ends with a retrospective discussion of which hopes and promises from more than a decade ago have/have not materialized.