Estimating the position of political parties: comparison of methods

After reviewing the literature on the ways used by Voting Advice Application (VAA) designers to position the political parties and the advantages and the disadvantages of the methods that have been used so far, we explore if we can use the position of the candidates as an estimate for the position of their parties. We argue that by using the candidates we get the information by the source itself, but at the same time we overcome the disadvantages of asking only the leadership of the party (i.e. non-response, manipulation of the position to make their party appear closer to the most popular positions, and lack of any measure of uncertainty). Thus, we have asked candidates of the 2014 European Parliament election both in Greece and Germany and candidates of the January 2015 Greek Parliamentary election to position themselves on a series of issues that have been used in the corresponding VAAs. Then we use these positions to estimate the position of their parties and we compare these estimates with the party positions that have been used in the VAAs. The comparisons show that there are no significant differences between the estimates for most of the parties and most of the statements.