Bringing Together VAA Data and Party Research

Abstract

While the original intention of constructing voting advice applications (VAAs) is the provision of tools that allow voters to compare their policy positions with those of parties and, thus, give them orientation in elections, a further strand of research around VAAs has grown. This strand does not contrast the answers of voters and parties but searches for differences between the various parties. The potential for party and party system research is enormous. A new source for data emerges which allows researchers to estimate which parties are close or distant to each other, in which policy fields parties do or do not share similar positions, how party systems are structured, and much more. At the same time, there might be concerns that data which has originally been collected for other purposes could be inappropriate for the analysis of parties and party systems. This panel includes papers which theoretically discuss the viability of VAA data for party research and/or apply VAA data empirically in order to contribute to questions as sketched above.