The Methodological Challenges of Designing Cross-National Voting Advice Applications

Abstract

The implementation of EU Profiler during the 2009 elections to the European Parliament as well as the planning of pan-European VAAs for 2014 have raised a number of methodological issues regarding the design of VAAs in a cross-national context. Cross-national VAAs need to employ a common questionnaire to enable comparisons, but also questions to reflect the particularities of electoral campaigns in individual countries. Moreover, there needs to be some methodological consistency in the estimation of the positions of political parties, even though national VAAs use different methods for doing so. Similarly, the methods that are used to match voters to parties have been shown to have varying degrees of efficiency across countries. Furthermore, for VAAs that provide low-dimensional visualizations of the European political space, there have been concerns regarding the scalability of items/issues to ideological dimensions across countries. Finally, cross-national VAA designs raise questions regarding the representativeness, cleaning, and weighting of the user-generated data. The panel welcomes contributions addressing any of the aforementioned methodological issues in a comparative perspective using cross-national data.

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