The past few years have seen the advent and proliferation of Voting Advice (or Aid) Applications (VAAs), which offer voting advice on the basis of calculating the ideological congruence between citizens and political actors. Although VAA data have often been used to test many empirical questions regarding voting behaviour and political participation, we know little about the approaches used by VAAs to estimate the positions of political parties. This article presents the most common aspects of the VAA approach and examines some methodological issues regarding the phrasing of statements, the format of response scales, the reliability of coding statements into response scales and the reliability and validity of scaling items into dimensions. The article argues that VAAs have a lot of potential but there is also much space for methodological improvements, and therefore concludes with some recommendations for designing VAAs.

Maggini, N. (2010). Quali prospettive per il Pd e gli altri partiti di centrosinistra? Un’analisi dei dati e delle tendenze elettorali. Quaderni Del Circolo Rosselli, 108(3-4), 117–120.

CHIARAMONTE, A. C. A., & Sio, L. D. (Eds.). (2014). Terremoto elettorale. Le elezioni politiche del 2013, 1–276.

It is commonplace to see political parties as fundamentally constrained by public opinion. By contrast, this paper argues that party competition amplifies mass ideological polarization over public policy. Specifically, the investigation concerns the relationship between mass-level ideology and ethnic exclusionism (the call for harsh immigration policies). As party competition intensifies, this relationship strengthens. The party competition thesis is tested by performing a comparative study of Denmark and Sweden. Unlike their Danish counterparts, Swedish political parties have, most of the time, refused to take opposed stands on immigration policy. In effect, the empirical data show that the individual-level association between self-reported ideology and ethnic exclusionism is considerably stronger in Denmark than in Sweden. To investigate the party competition effect in depth, both longitudinal analyses and a cross-sectional analysis are performed. Data cover the period 1990-2008.

Barisione, M., Catellani, P., & De Sio, L. (2011). La scelta degli indecisi. In P. Bellucci & P. Segatti (Eds.), Votare in Italia: 1968-2008. Dall’appartenenza alla scelta (pp. 359–379). Bologna: Il Mulino.