Geographical variations of the issue space? Evidence from a geo-localized Voting Advice Application

This paper investigates the role of policy issues in Italy at the occasion of the 2014 European Parliament elections. We use data from the "euandi" Voting Advice Application, which has collected positions on 30 issues for all main Italian parties, as well as for a geo-localized sample of more than 150,000 Internet users across the country. After presenting the dataset, the paper moves on to investigating three main research questions. 1) The structure and dimensionality of the issue space, confronted with a descriptive analysis; 2) the importance of different issues for party preference, through an individual-level explanatory analysis; 3) the presence of territorial variation in the two aforementioned aspects, with the expectation that both the dimensionality and relative importance of issues might vary in relation to aspects such as local political cultures, and general dimensions such as centre-periphery and city-country.