Voting Advice Applications and Party Mapping Research

Abstract

To date most VAA research has concentrated on topics related to the VAA-phenomenon itself. Two areas especially stand out: methodological issues surrounding the design of VAAs and the user impact of VAAs (e.g., on political participation and/or respondents’ vote choice). This panel is motivated by an alternative and largely non VAA-centric line of research. It asks what we can learn about political parties from VAAs and the datasets they generate. A first, and rather obvious area, is how political parties adapt/react to VAAs. Experiences from political settings where VAAs have become more institutionalised would be especially welcome. Another area in which VAA data could yield potentially new insights is with regard to mapping political parties in the ideological space. Typically this has usually been done through expert surveys or the content analysis of party manifestos. Given the datasets produced by VAAs there has been surprisingly little published research on the topic. To what extent, then, could VAAs offer a complementary data source for estimating political parties’ ideological positions? This panel invites paper contributions linking VAAs to various aspects of party mapping, especially those that adopt a comparative focus (longitudinal or cross-national).

Title	Details
Post-Arab Spring Elections: A Comparison of VAA Results	View Paper Details
Perception and Usage of VAA by Candidates: Comparing Switzerland and Luxembourg	View Paper Details
Mapping Voters, Candidates and Parties with a Voting Advice Application	View Paper Details
Identifying the Ideological Space of German State-Level Party Competition Using Voting Advice Applications	View Paper Details
The Ideological Mapping of Political Parties in Romania. The Relationship between Dimensions of Competition and Ideological Consistency	View Paper Details