Besides the studies that gauge the individual effects among VAA users, there is also underexposed research on the behavior of the involved political parties. VAAs select a number of relevant policy-issues and reduce them to a set of theses while at the same time collecting and processing the respective party positions. This paper focusses on the “Stemwijzer”-model in which the parties position themselves towards theses. These theses are developed previously by researchers or other involved groups, each thesis reflecting a political or societal theme. With this method the policies relevant to the campaign will be covered by the theses. Confronting the involved parties with these theses, forces them to take clear positions on relevant issues in the election campaign. Because VAAs are always connected to specific elections, results of a party’s positioning are always in close temporal proximity to an election and often relevant for the parties’ election campaigning. This paper encompasses positions of all relevant parties during the German Federal Election of 2009. The two central data resources are election programs of the German parties and their answers towards the theses of the German VAA “Wahl-O-Mat”. For the German case this questions will be addressed for the first time with the method of content analysis. Therefore each thesis in the “Wahl-O-Mat” for each relevant party will be coded in relation to the election programs based on the degree of agreement. Major results of this paper show differences between the positioning of political parties in election programs and their stances in VAAs. The analysis will furthermore focus on possible different forms of discrepancies between several party groups (e.g. big vs. little parties, governing vs. opposition parties, left vs. right parties). Above that the results will provide some explanation for these differences and discuss the strategic positioning of political parties in this context.
