ABOUT
EU&I 2024 represents a means for voters to gain an unobstructed view of the European political space, and their place within it. This space is defined by the policies of the parties competing in the 2024 European Parliament (EP) elections. EU&I provides users a political profile based on their responses to a list of 30 policy statements. Users can react to each issue statement by stating their level of agreement on a standard five-point scale ranging from ‘completely agree’ to ‘completely disagree’ plus a ‘no opinion’ option. They can also assign saliency to issues by indicating to which extent they regard each issue as personally important to them. The tool then uses a mathematic algorithm (see the section on methodology, in English) to give greater emphasis to the positions weighted by the user as being ‘more important’, and less emphasis to those weighted as ‘less important’. The user’s political profile can be examined in relation to the political parties of a given nation, as well as with national parties from the entire European Union and the transnational Europarties.
The EU&I team strives to be inclusive and comprehensive in selecting parties across the EU. The country teams worked on the basis on the following criteria: parties included are either a) represented in the country's National Parliament, b) represented in the current European Parliament, c) consistently credited with at least 1% of the popular vote in recent polls.
EU&I’s unique specificity is the European dimension, providing a harmonised voting advice application across all European Union member states. This comes with limitations in view of the number of parties included and the work required to code them.
EU&I is an offer of the European University Institute to interested citizens and not an official information tool by a national public institution. Therefore, the EUI has no legal obligation to cover each and every party participating in the European Parliamentary elections.
The quality of EU&I depends first and foremost on the statements we chose. This is not a simple task and the EU&I team dedicated a significant amount of time on this. Our first criterion is to look for statements that are politically relevant. Whether one likes Wagner more than Verdi cannot become a statement. However, whether the EU should be enlarged to include Ukraine is an excellent candidate for the tool (and it eventually became part of the 33 statements). Furthermore, this is an excellent statement as parties running in the campaign take up very different positions vis-à-vis this issue. And this is exactly what we are looking for: statements on which there is disagreement between the parties. To identify a broad range of relevant and polarizing issues, we use the results of opinion polls, media sources, academic research, expert opinions – we consult many of these sources to find out what topics are important in European politics. This way, we select the issues covering a very large proportion of contemporary democratic policy making and attitudes toward politics in the EU member states. The list of statements and their precise phrasing is finalized in co-operation with our scientific committee and external experts to make them as precise, clear and meaningful as possible.
It should be noted that while EU&I is developed for the European Parliament elections, the statement selection is not restricted to issues that are necessarily in EU jurisdiction. Although many statements do cover EU policies, we also aim at covering party positions more broadly on the central ideological dimensions that structure European politics, even if some of those issues are actually decided on at the national level. A number of statements are also continuous from earlier editions of transnational VAAs, such as the EU Profiler (EP elections 2009) and euandi (EP elections 2014 & 2019).
Political parties that are chosen by our team to be included to EU&I are given the opportunity to react to the statements and provide their self-placement. The EU&I team contacts the parties inviting them to fill in a questionnaire and motivating their choices by supplying supporting material. In parallel, the 27 country expert teams proceed to code parties’ positions independently of the parties. Our experts are also asked to specify what documentation they had used to place parties. They are invited to use seven types of sources hierarchically ordered – the top being the party’s current EP election manifesto. In instances where the party has not released any, the researchers refer to other party manifestos, party websites, statements in the media and other secondary sources. Here is the rank-ordered of the seven main categories of sources:
1. 2024 EP election manifesto of the party
2. Latest national election manifesto of the party
3. Other programmatic and official party documentation
4. Recent interviews, press releases and social media communication
(from party, party leader and/or leading candidates)
5. Older national or European election manifestos
6. 2024 EP election manifesto of the respective Europarty
7. Other sources
In order to ensure the highest possible level of reliability, country team-leaders run additional checks before finalising the process of party placement. When the party self-placement and the expert coding are completed, the two results are compared. Where there are discrepancies, the party is asked to provide more support for its declared position, and a final answer is identified. Where parties decline the invitation, country teams take care of positioning the parties based on the available documentation.
Please note that while the parties themselves are consulted, the final decision on positions is always taken the country team, offering the tool a complete impartiality and independence.