Stemtest 2024 / Test Electoral 2024

This deposit accompanies the datasets related to the development of Stemtest 2024 / Test Electoral 2024, a voting advice application developed in the context of the 2024 general elections of June 2024. Stemtest/Test Electoral was commissioned by VRT, RTBF, Mediahuis and IPM.

In total, the project comprised 12 distinct voting advice applications (VAAs):
2 ‘generic’ VAAs that span the three policy levels (Federal, Regional and European) (referred to as ‘VAA_GEN_NL’ for the Dutch version, ‘VAA_GEN_FR’ for the French version);
2 ‘youth’ VAAs with particular focus on topics pertaining to younger voters (also spanning the three policy levels (referred to as ‘VAA_YOUTH_NL’ and ‘VAA_YOUTH_FR’);
2 federal VAAs containing only statements on federal policy competences (‘VAA_FED_NL’ and ‘VAA_FED_FR’);
4 regional VAAs containing only statements pertaining to the regional competences (VAA_VLA for Flanders, VAA_WAL for Wallonia, VAA_BXL_NL and VAA_BXL_FR for Brussels);
2 European VAAs containing only statements pertaining to the European competences (VAA_EU_NL and VAA_EU_FR).

The data associated with the deposit are:
Methods note: outlines the process and outlines the relevant documents pertaining to the development of the 2024 VAA.
Final statement dataset: finalized dataset in Stata, SPSS, CSV and Excel format, containing all 348 policy statements, party positions and arguments, assignment to each of the 12 VAAs, statement weights, left-right coding, issue allocations, etc.
Benchmark surveys: 8 datasets in Stata and SPSS format containing the benchmark survey data used in the calibration. The benchmark names refer to the associated VAA for which they were used. Note that due to budget constraints, the following VAAs were not benchmarked: VAA_BXL_NL, VAA_BXL_FR, VAA_EU_NL and VAA_EU_FR.
Calibration files: this stata do file (Calibration.do) uses multiple raw input files (located in the subfolder ‘raw data’) to generate 12 excel files that KPSoft needed to set up the calibration tool.
Test files: this stata do file (TestFiles.do) updates the test files for BitsOfLove (BoL).
Media reporting files: the script “MediaReporting.do” generates excels with basic analyses of the Benchmark surveys.
Log data reports: the reports based on the log data of VAA usage were prepared in early 2025, and can be found under the subfolder ‘LogDataReports’.