Voting Advice Applications and Party Positioning. Measuring Policy Positions of Parties and Intra-Party Cohesiveness

Abstract

There are various ways to position political parties. A possible approach is to ask the leadership of the party to position the parties and provide a brief justification of this placement. Other approaches include expert surveys and manifesto analyses – all bearing distinctive well-known advantages as well as drawbacks. Finally, we can use the position of the candidates. This way we will have the information by the source itself (instead of depending to an external source, such as an expert who may not know the party's position on the less salient issues), but at the same time we overcome the disadvantages of asking only the leadership of the party (i.e. non-response, manipulation of the position to make their party appear closer to the most popular positions, and lack of any measure of uncertainty). In addition, candidate data, whether gathered through surveys or ‘candidate-oriented’ Voting Advice Applications, allow for an estimation of the degree of intra-party policy cohesion. We welcome the submission of papers that deal with any of the methods of party and candidate positioning. We strongly encourage papers that compare two or more methods and we are extremely interested in papers that use candidate data as the basis of one of the compared estimates of either interparty or intra-party policy differences.

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