Overview
euandi2022 is a Voting Advice Application (VAA) aiming at helping citizens make an informed choice in the 2022 French presidential elections. Available in French and English, euandi2021 invites users to react to 34 policy statements covering a wide range of contemporary policy issues and political values in French politics. Developed by the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, in close collaboration with Sciences Po Paris, euandi2021 provides voters with a clear view of the French electoral campaign and the candidates' 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. euandi2022 is developed by academics for the wider public – it explicitly is not aiming at favouring any political party or candidate. Note also that euandi2022 can be used completely free of cost by whatever interested person, organisation or institution. The code of the software of euandi2022 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?
euandi2022 represents a means for voters to gain an unobstructed view of the French political space, and their place within it. This space is defined by the policies of the candidates competing in the 2022 French presidential elections. euandi2022 provides users a political profile based on their responses to a list of 34 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 12 French candidates.

Selecting the statements
It goes almost without saying that the quality of euandi2022 depends first and foremost on the statements we chose. This is not a very simple task and the euandi2022 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 the inheritance tax should be increased is an excellent statement: it is so because candidates 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 canddiates. Furthermore, we wanted to cover the issues at stake in the French election campaign as broadly as possible. For this, the team of French 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), euandi (EP elections 2014 and 2019) and euandi2921 (German federal elections 2021). Eventually, 36 statements were selected, and all 12 candidates 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 2 statements were dropped out, and the definitive list of 34 statements was included in euandi2022.

Coding the candidates
Candidates running in the 2022 French presidential elections and selected by the euandi2022 team for inclusion in the tool were placed, statement by statement, by the euandi2022 ‘coders’ (team members taking care of the party placement). Our coders were asked to specify what documentation they had used in order to place parties. According to the euandi2022 methodology, thery relied on 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 (2022) presidential 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 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 candidate placement. Where there were discrepancies, a final answer was identified by the team leader in agreement with the coder responsible for that political party, always aiming at complete impartiality and independence.

Data use
The project’s primary goal is that of providing a space where French voters (or anyone interested in French poltics) can simultaneously learn about candidates positions and their own place in politics. As with every VAA, the makers of euandi2022 aim primarily at helping voters make a well-informed decision. At the same time, and unlike most VAAs, it is the declared objective of euandi2022 to provide scientists with a rich source of academically valuable data. The coding of French candidates' positions on 34 issues will result in a rich dataset of German party positions. The dataset, including supporting material and coding documentation, will then 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 euandi2022 team
The euandi2022 scientific leadership is shared between Dr. Lorenzo Cicchi and Dr. ELie Michel (respectively at the European University Institute and SciencesPo Paris), 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)
ELie MIchel (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)
Antoine Balthazar De Robiano (country team coder)
Maxime Borg (country team coder)
Morgan Le Corre Juratic (country team coder)
Robin Huguenot-Noel (country team coder)

Contact: vaa@eui.eu