Investigating candidates and issue competition with Voting Advice Application data

Abstract

Candidate-based Voting Advice Applications represent a new and still under-used source of information on candidates running for elections, and therefore on (aspiring) political elites (Dumont et al. 2014; Hansen and Rasmussen 2013). They communicate candidates’ policy positions and other relevant aspects of their candidacy (their background, their campaign statement etc.) to the public and are made available in an expanding number of countries. Contrary to traditional candidate surveys, the rate of response of these online tools is very high and the candidates respond non-anonymously. The latter point means that the strategic incentives that generally apply to public candidate position-taking are also reflected in the positions they take in those VAAs (Tromborg 2020). Their existence also opens up possibilities for comparing or combining data from candidate-centered VAAs and traditional candidate surveys. This panel includes papers that use candidate information available on VAAs either exclusively or in combination with other sources to study a wide variety of questions requiring the analysis of data on political elites’ and parties’ positions.

Title	Details
Party and Candidate Strategies in Voting Advice Applications Over Time	View Paper Details
Effect of candidate’s ideological position on candidate success in presence of electoral complexity in OLPR systems	View Paper Details
Exploring where the party is with candidate VAA data	View Paper Details
Electoral Institutions and Candidate Position Taking	View Paper Details