Longitudinal dataset of political issue-positions of 411 parties across 28 European countries (2009–2019) from voting advice applications EU profiler and euandi

This data article provides a descriptive overview of the “EU Profiler/euandi trend file (2009–2019)“dataset and the data collection methods. The dataset compiles party position data from three consecutive pan-European Voting Advice Appli- cations (VAAs), developed by the European University Insti- tute for the European Parliament elections in 2009, 2014 and 2019. It includes the positions of 411 parties from 28 Euro- pean countries on a wide range of salient political issues. Al- together, the dataset contains more than 20 0 0 0 unique party positions. To place the parties on the political issues, all three editions of the VAA have used the same iterative method that combines party self-placement and expert judgement. The data collection has been a collective effort of several hundreds of highly trained social scientists, involving experts from each EU member state. The political statements that the parties were placed on, were identical across all the coun- tries and 15 of the statements remained the same through- out all three waves (2009, 2014, 2019) of data collection. Be- cause of the unique methodology and the large volume of data, the dataset offers a significant contribution to the re- search on European party systems and on party positioning methodologies.