Similar to other post-communist party systems, the Romanian party ideological space is marked by a certain degree of fuzziness and by the reluctance of politicians and their organizations to assume clear policy stances and maintain them over time (van Biezen 2003; Millard 2004; Enyedi and Toka 2007; Tavits 2008).
Our paper discusses how and why designing a VAA in a new democracy may differ fundamentally from those in established democracies. We argue that given the low relevance of issue voting and programmatic competition, VAAs may not aim to approximate how voters make up their mind but rather simply stress salient issues and draw attention to party positions and divides on these issues. Yet, this distinct role is risky especially given high disaffection from politics and voting behavior dominated by charismatic appeals. Moreover, parties’ strategic behavior vis-à-vis the VAA may be more of an issue in new democracies than in established ones (see Ramonaite 2010 compared to Schwartz et al 2010). Finally, a benchmark for analyzing reliability is even more difficult to find since the online population differs significantly from the electorate as a whole given internet access issues.
We analyze especially the crux of the matter, the tradeoffs between various statement selection methods and distinct approaches to assessing positions and consulting the parties. We consider the implications of election types for these choices as well as distinct levels of transparency in terms of goals and assumptions behind these choices. We assess all VAAs that existed in Romania at parliamentary, presidential and EP elections, including our own Testvot application, available since 2008. The VAA party profiles are compared with a traditional source of party ideology mapping - MPs and candidate survey data - collected from the last two electoral cycles, as well as with mass and expert surveys on party placements.
