The practicalities of issuing vote advice: a new methodology for profiling and matching.

Abstract: What methods are used and what methodological issues are involved when Vote Advice Applications (VAAs) compare voter and party policy stances? This paper examines these questions by describing a newly developed methodology to code party positions on salient political issues, combing expert-judgements based on text analysis with self-placement of parties. This paper also reflects on methodologies used by VAA developers to identify salient issues and discusses how these issues are reframed into statements to which users of these online tools are asked to respond, as well as how relevant party documentation is identified and how these textual sources are used to calibrate political parties on the issues. Finally, the paper outlines some of the methodological problems that occur when scientists seek to aggregate voters' opinions into an easy-to-understand output representing their position in a political landscape relative to the policy positions of competing parties.