A new approach for estimating parties' positions in voting advice applications

The primary goal of voting advice applications (VAAs) is to calculate the match between voters' and parties' (or candidates) policy preferences. In order to do so, it is necessary for VAAs to estimate the positions of political parties. In many respects this is a daunting task given that all the commonly used methods for doing so have considerable drawbacks. Most VAAs use a combination of two methods, namely questionnaires sent to parties and expert coding based on party manifestos. The paper will outline the existing approaches in terms of validity and reliability and will propose some improvements in the form of a formal approach to expert coding over multiple rounds with anonymous feedback. The paper will present examples of the advantages of this method using evidence from Choose4Greece, a VAA launched for the May and June 2012 parliamentary elections in Greece.