Party Placement Across Europe: Introduction to the Euandi 2019 Data

Assessing the positions of political parties has long been a challenge for political scientist. The European election bring additional difficulties since they are the democratic elections in which the greater number of political parties are running at the same time, but in different national systems - and different languages. Transnational Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) provide a unique tool to gather comparable data on party positions in all EU Member States. This paper introduces the dataset collected through the euandi 2019 VAA. It uses relies on an iterative methods which goes beyond existing techniques of party positioning. It combines party-self placement and expert judgment, which has been conducted by a team of more than 100 political scientists. Not only does this data provide comparable measure of party positions across European party systems, but it also allow for longitudinal research on party competition as it shares 17 issue positions with the EU Profiler 2009 and euandi 2014 datasets. In this paper, we present the euandi method of party positioning – and how it improves current techniques. We then present the first findings on party placement in Europe in 2019. Finally, we present patterns of evolution of party systems between 2009 and 2019 in EU Member States.