Overview
euandi2021 is a Voting Advice Application (VAA) aiming at helping citizens make an informed choice in the 2021 German federal elections. Available in German and English, euandi2021 invites users to react to 35 policy statements covering a wide range of contemporary policy issues and political values in German politics. Developed by the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, in close collaboration with Universität der Bundeswehr München, euandi2021 provides voters with a clear view of the German electoral campaign and their individual positions within it. The tool’s strong scientific background makes it interesting not only to the general public, but also to academics, experts and policy makers. It is important to note that this tool is politically neutral. euandi2021 is developed by academics for the wider public – it explicitly is not aiming at favouring any political party or group of parties. Note also that euandi2021 can be used completely free of cost by whatever interested person, organisation or institution. The code of the software of euandi2021 is based on a previous VAA built for the European elections of 2019, euandi2019, originally developed by the Zurich (Switzerland) based company xUpery Ltd. under the name “Societly”. Societly is a functioning VAA software that is available for free, under an MIT license, on www.GitHub.com.

How does it work?
euandi2021 represents a means for voters to gain an unobstructed view of the German political space, and their place within it. This space is defined by the policies of the parties competing in the 2021 German federal elections. euandi2021 provides users a political profile based on their responses to a list of 35 policy statements. Users can react to each and every 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. The user’s political profile can then be examined in relation to the main 15 German political parties.

Selecting the parties
The euandi2021 team tried to be as inclusive as possible and the exclusion of a party was only considered if a range of opinion polls strongly suggested that the party would not win a single seat in the election. Every party that currently has a seat in the German Parliament is included. It should be noted that all rights are reserved by the euandi2021 team for the selection of parties to be integrated in the tool.

Selecting the statements
It goes almost without saying that the quality of euandi2021 depends first and foremost on the statements we chose. This is not a very simple task and the euandi2021 team spent quite a bit of time on this. Our first criterion was to look for statements that are politically relevant. Whether one likes Wagner more than Verdi cannot become a statement. However, whether a general rent cap – Mietendeckel – should be introduced to curb the rising rents is an excellent candidate for the tool (and it eventually became part of the 35 statements). It is an excellent statement as parties running in the campaign take up very different positions vis-à-vis this issue. And this is what we were looking for: statements on which there is disagreement between the parties. Furthermore, we wanted to cover the issues at stake in the German election campaign as broadly as possible. For this, the team of German political scientists who worked on coding the party positions suggested a number of relevant statements. Some of the statements are directly taken from traditional survey questions, allowing us to validate/compare our data with other sources. We also tried to re-use statements from earlier editions of transnational VAAs, such as the EU Profiler (EP elections 2009) and euandi (EP elections 2014 and 2019). Eventually, 41 statements were selected, and all 15 parties were placed on these statements; then, these statements were empirically analysed to see if any of them were not polarizing the parties enough (i.e., most parties were taking the same stance). Finally 6 statements were dropped out, and the definitive list of 35 statements was included in euandi2021.

Coding the parties
Political parties running in the 2021 German federal elections and selected by the euandi2021 team for inclusion in the tool were given the opportunity to react to the 35 statements and provide their self-placement. The euandi2021 team identified and contacted the parties inviting them to fill in a questionnaire and motivating their choices by supplying supporting material. In parallel, the ‘coders’ (team members taking care of the party placement) proceeded to code parties’ positions. Our experts were asked to specify what documentation they had used in order to place parties. They were invited to use a number of sources hierarchically ordered – the top being the party’s own electoral manifesto. In instances where the party has not released any opinion, the researchers referred to other party manifestos, party websites, statements in the media and other secondary sources. Here is the rank-ordered of the eight main categories of sources:

• Current (2021) Federal election manifesto;
• Other programmatic and official party documentation (e.g. party programme);
• Recent interviews, press releases and social media communication (from party leader and/or leading candidates);
• Older Federal election manifestos;
• Older European and/or sub-national election manifestos;
• Other sources.

In order to ensure the highest possible level of reliability among coders, the team leader ran additional checks before finalising the process of party placement. When the party self-placement and the expert coding were completed, the two results were compared. Where there were discrepancies, a final answer was identified by the team leader in agreemend with the coder responsible for that political party. Where parties declined the invitation, country teams took care of positioning the parties based on the available documentation. While the parties themselves were consulted, the final decision on positions always lay with the team leader and coder, offering the tool a complete impartiality and independence.

Data use
The project’s primary goal is that of providing a space where German voters (or anyone interested in German poltics)  can simultaneously learn about party positions and their own place in politics. As with every VAA, the makers of euandi2021 aim primarily at helping voters make a well-informed decision. At the same time, and unlike most VAAs, it is the declared objective of euandi2021 to provide scientists with a rich source of academically valuable data. The coding of German party positions on 23 issues for will result in a rich dataset of German party positions. The dataset, including supporting material and coding documentation, will soon be made freely available to scholars and to the public at large. For further information on the handling of data, please see the related privacy statement on this site.

The euandi2021 team
The euandi2021 scientific leadership is shared between Dr. Lorenzo Cicchi, Dr. Andres Reiljan and Dr. Wiebke Drews (respectively at the European University Institute, University of Tartu and Universität der Bundeswehr München), who were supported by the advisory board members Prof Dr. Alexander H. Trechsel (University of Luzern) and Prof. Dr. Diego Garzia (University of Lausanne). The full team is the following:

Lorenzo Cicchi (project co-director)
Andres Reiljan (project co-director)
Wiebke Drews (project co-director and coders team leader)
Alexander H. Trechsel (advisory board member)
Diego Garzia (advisory board member)
Lorenzo Corsani (tech coordinator)
Ingo Linsenmann (financial and administrative coordinator)
Elena Torta (media and outreach coordinator)
Joanna Zofia Wielgo (administrative and financial support)
Martina Popova (media and outreach support)
Simone Ottaviano (tech support)
Caroline Lerch (country team coder)
Stephan Pietzner (country team coder)
Lennart Schulze (country team coder)
Rouven Symank (country team coder)
Mirko Wegemann (country team coder)

Contact: vaa@eui.eu