The primary goal of voting advice applications (VAAs) is to calculate the match between voters' and parties' (or candidates) policy preferences. In order to do so, it is necessary for VAAs to estimate the positions of political parties. In many respects this is a daunting task given that all the commonly used methods for doing so have considerable drawbacks. Most VAAs use questionnaires sent to parties and/or expert coding based on party manifestos. The paper will outline some drawbacks of the existing approaches in terms of validity and reliability and will propose the iterative expert survey approach. The paper will evaluate the new method using data from EUVOX, a pan-European VAA for the 2014 elections to the European Parliament.
