Parties position themselves in various ways: Besides the traditional way of election programs the emergence of Voting Advice Applications brought a new form of positioning into the political arena. Especially interesting is the positioning in the Stemwijzer-Tools (e.g. the German “Wahl-O-Mat”) because in contrast to the Kieskompas-Tools, they offer parties the opportunity to completely position themselves. In general, within VAAs a number of relevant issues are selected and reduced to a set of theses while at the same time respective party positions are collected. Confronting the involved parties with these theses, forces them to take a clear stand on relevant issues. As VAAs relate to specific elections, the results of a party’s positioning are always in close temporal proximity to a certain election.
This paper encompasses positions of five relevant parties (Christian democrats, Social democrats, Greens, The Left and Liberals) during the German Federal Election in 2009. The two central data sources are the election programs and their stances towards the theses in the “Wahl-O-Mat”. For the German case this questions will be addressed with the method of content analysis. In a first step each thesis in the “Wahl-O-Mat” will be coded for each party according to the relation in the election programs based on the degree of agreement (fully agreement reflects 0, slightly difference 1 and strong difference 2 points of distance). The results show differences between the parties’ positions in election programs and their stances in VAAs. In a second step this paper will focus on a qualitative analysis of the theses with deviating party positions in order to explain the differences between the two forms of positioning. The results show that parties use new forms of positioning for their election campaign to address different target groups and position themselves in different strategically ways.
