The European elections of next 8 and 9 June are approaching and for citizens still undecided or disoriented about voting, an online application developed as part of the European EU&I project, in which the Department of Political Sciences of the University of Pisa participates, comes to the rescue. The heads of the Pisa research unit are professors Eugenio Pizzimenti and Enrico Calossi, of the Department of Political Science, who have already supervised the construction of similar applications in the past on the occasion of the 2019 European Elections and the 2018 Political Elections and the 2022.
EU&I (https://euandi.eu/) is a Voting Advice Application developed by the European University Institute (EUI) of Florence for the next European Parliament elections. It is an online tool designed to help citizens understand the political landscape by matching their preferences to those expressed by political parties. EU&I will be available in all European Union member states, in all official EU languages, and will potentially attract millions of users and voters.
EU&I uses a robust scientific methodology to analyze and code over 250 parties participating in the upcoming elections. In the weeks leading up to the 2024 vote, a team of 130 scholars across Europe are conducting meticulous research into party positions and official documentation to position candidates based on 30 statements in the questionnaire. “EU&I contains several dozen statements on relevant political issues – explain professors Pizzimenti and Calossi – users are asked to evaluate them using a scale with five scores (from “completely agree” to “completely disagree”). Once the users have evaluated all the statements, the algorithm indicates how close (in %) the programmatic profiles of the political parties are to the preferences expressed by the user”.
The team of young researchers from the University of Pisa (Cecilia Castellani, Tommaso Cerutti, Lavinia De Santis, Francesco Giovacchini, Damiano Kerma and Beniamino Masi), coordinated by the unit managers, collected and codified the positions of the parties on the issues included, through an analysis of primary sources: the initial coding was subjected to further verification by senior researchers.
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Source: University of Pisa
