Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are non-partisan, independent platforms designed to inform and assist citizens during electoral campaigns. They help navigate the policy proposals of competing political parties and/or candidates, with the goal of finding the best fit between individuals’ policy preferences and the proposals put forward by political parties. Users typically complete an online questionnaire indicating their positions on several policy statements (e.g. ‘social programmes should be maintained even at the cost of higher taxes’ or ’immigration should be made more restrictive’), which are then compared with parties’ stances on the same issues, producing a rank-ordered list or graph presenting users with the parties matching more closely with their policy preferences. 

In addition to offering a useful tool to voters (and parties), EU&I produces highly relevant scientific data for researchers and practitioners interested in political parties and elections, which is regularly made available to the academic community, in full compliance with privacy standards. In particular, the “EU Profiler/euandi trend file (2009–2019)“ dataset compiles party position data from three consecutive pan-European Voting Advice Applications (VAAs), developed by the European University Institute for the European Parliament elections in 2009, 2014 and 2019. It includes the positions of 411 parties from 28 European countries on a wide range of salient political issues. Altogether, the dataset contains more than 20,000 unique party positions. To place the parties on the political issues, all three editions of the VAA have used the same iterative method that combines party self-placement and expert judgement. The data collection has been a collective effort of several hundreds of highly trained social scientists, involving experts from each EU member state. The political statements that the parties were placed on, were identical across all the countries and 15 of the statements remained the same throughout all three waves (2009, 2014, 2019) of data collection. Because of the unique methodology and the large volume of data, the dataset offers a significant contribution to the research on European party systems and on party positioning methodologies.