Voting Advice Applications, Party Positioning and Party Systems: Measuring the Dimensionality of the Political Space across Countries and Time

Abstract

The estimation of party positions in policy spaces is an important task for numerous political science subfields. It is needed, e.g., for analyses of electoral campaigning, voting behavior, coalition building, legislative processes, and many more. Voting Advice Applications (VAA) are a tool originally designed for another purpose – namely giving voters an orientation about how strongly they agree or disagree with programs of various parties – but have become an interesting alternative and/or supplement to so far existing data bases like expert surveys or party manifestos. However, the estimation of party positions is a highly sensitive challenge, and we still lack knowledge about the empirical connections of and differences between the various methods. This panel aims to bring together authors trying to reduce this gap on the basis of VAA analyses. Papers in this panel can include (but are not limited to) - the development and application of VAA based methods to estimate party positions, - the comparison of party positions based on VAA data with those generated by other methods, - analyses of party competition, voting behavior, coalition building or similar on the basis of VAA data, or - VAA based methods to estimate the dimensionality of policy spaces. Both theoretical and empirical papers are welcome.