Exploring where the party is with candidate VAA data

Party unity is fundamental to representation. Consequently, it is of critical importance to understand its causes. Existing research suggests that party unity can be caused by both strategic and sincere motivations. Strategic motivations include party discipline and a lack of personal vote-seeking incentives. The sincere motivation is shared policy preferences. However, disentangling these possible causes of party unity empirically is notoriously difficult because they are not directly observable. The solution, we argue, is to compare the positions that party elites take in public, where strategic incentives apply, to those they take outside of the public sphere, where sincere preferences are more likely to be expressed. Specifically, we compare parliamentary candidate positions in public Voting Advice Applications to their positions in anonymous elite surveys made for academic purposes. The results help us understand the contextual variation in party unity better and further contributes to our knowledge about party and elite strategies.