This paper is an attempt to validate Wordscores for use in VAA’s. Wordscores is a method that can perform quantative text analysis to score texts on an a priori specified dimension. In this paper, I compare the scores Wordscores assigns to the electoral manifestos of the parties participating in the 2009 European Parliament elections with the scores given in expert studies and VAAs. The goal is to evaluate the concordance of party positions as given in Wordscores with the positions as given in other methods used in VAAs. In the event that concordance is high, this can have consequences for the design of so-called voting advice applications, as computerized methods can significantly improve the speed and cost-benefit ratio involved in making them.
