Dimensionality of the European Issue Space 1 NCCR Bern Workshop Vote Advice Applications, November 12-13, 2009 Dimensionality of the European issue space Jan Kleinnijenhuis and Andre Krouwel Department of Commmunication Science, resp. department of Political Science Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam De Boelelaan 1081 1081 HV Amsterdam j.kleinnijenhuis@fsw.vu.nl ; apm.krouwel@fsw.vu.nl Abstract Vote advice applications offer the possibility to investigate the dimensionality of issue spaces in great detail, because of their multitude and diversity of included issues as compared election survey studies, expert surveys and media content analysis studies. During the campaign for the European parliamentary elections in 2009 almost a million Europeans divided over 27 countries disclosed thirty issue positions in order to learn how they were positioned in the political landscape according to an internet based vote consultation application, namely the EU*profiler (developed by Kieskompas [Amsterdam], NCCR Democracy/Politools [Zürich], and the European University Institute [Florence]). Nations with more than 5000 respondents were included in the current paper. The paper addresses three questions: (1) which policy dimensions underlie the specific issue positions of European voters? (2) to what extent do European nations share the same policy dimensions? (3) will citizens with outspoken positions on the underlying policy dimensions cast their vote more often on the basis of issue positions? .