Studying Party Voter Congruence in the European Elections 2024: Introducing a New VAA Dataset on German Voter Positions

European Union Politics
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vi, 1-9 S.
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2025

Thomeczek, Jan Philipp, Constantin Wurthmann, Christian Stecker
ISSN: 1465-1165 (print), 1741-2757 (online)

We introduce a new dataset to study party-voter congruence in the European Elections 2024 in Germany. It contains party and voter positions on identical issues and scales collected using the voting advice application (VAA) ‘Europartycheck’, with over 40,000 users, and party positions from the ‘GEPARTEE’ expert survey. We present various steps to improve data quality. Besides data cleaning, we calculate weights to mitigate the selection bias in VAA usage and provide a VAA-quota sample (n = 2,000) that more closely resembles the German population. We provide example analyses for European Union items, left–right self-placement, and party-voter congruence for various voter groups (including voters of smaller parties such as Volt). A rich set of socio-demographic and additional variables, including populism, institutional trust, propensity to vote, and Euroscepticism, provides researchers with an important complement to existing datasets.