The Usability of VAA Data for Party Research

Abstract

While the original intention behind constructing VAAs is to provide tools that enable voters to compare their policy positions with those of parties, giving them orientation in elections, additional strands of research around VAAs have emerged. These strands leverage the enormous potential of VAA data for party and party system research. With the help of VAA data, researchers can estimate which parties are close to or distant from each other, identify party systems with centripetal or centrifugal tendencies, pinpoint representation gaps, and much more. However, there may be concerns that data originally collected for other purposes might be unsuitable for analysing parties and party systems. This panel welcomes papers that theoretically discuss the viability of VAA data for party research and/or empirically apply VAA data to contribute to the questions outlined above.

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