VAAs Users’ Voting Behavior and the Role of Partisanship. Evidence from the 2014 Belgian Federal Elections
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Marta Gallina
Marta Gallina is a PhD Student at the Centre of Political Science and Comparative Politics (CESPOL) at the Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve. She obtained her BA and MA in Social Sciences at the University of Milan, in 2013 and 2016, respectively. Her research interests mainly concern the study of political behavior, political sophistication, heuristics and Voting Advice Applications. In her PhD project she aims at developing a new measurement of opinion constraint and exploring its causal mechanisms, taking into account both individual and party system level factors. She recently contributed with a chapter to the book “Candidates, Parties and Voters in the Belgian Partitocracy,” edited by Audrey Vandeleene, Lieven De Winter and Pierre Baudewyns.
Abstract
In this article, I investigate the effects of Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) on voting behavior of their users. It has been already demonstrated that voters are more likely to follow VAAs recommendation when this latter is consistent with their previous vote intentions. However, the role of partisan attachments in this process has been generally overlooked. The basic idea that I intend to test, indeed, is that partisanship works as strong attitude in voters’ minds, making their preferences less amenable to VAAs advices if compared to those of non-partisan citizens. By implementing logistic regression models on panel data from the 2014 Belgian Federal elections, I show that it is actually unlikely that citizens decide to switch their vote after having played the test, if the advice is not consistent with pre-existing vote intentions. More importantly, I find that the impact of VAAs advice on vote choice is even weaker among citizens that declare to feel attached to a party.
About the author
Marta Gallina is a PhD Student at the Centre of Political Science and Comparative Politics (CESPOL) at the Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve. She obtained her BA and MA in Social Sciences at the University of Milan, in 2013 and 2016, respectively. Her research interests mainly concern the study of political behavior, political sophistication, heuristics and Voting Advice Applications. In her PhD project she aims at developing a new measurement of opinion constraint and exploring its causal mechanisms, taking into account both individual and party system level factors. She recently contributed with a chapter to the book “Candidates, Parties and Voters in the Belgian Partitocracy,” edited by Audrey Vandeleene, Lieven De Winter and Pierre Baudewyns.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to all the organizers and participants in the “Political Participation, Political Representation, and Voting Advice Applications” panel at the 46th ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops for their inspiring feedback on this paper. I also want to thank all the people involved in the “Effects of Voting Advice Applications on Political Attitudes and Behaviour” panel at the 2018 ECPR General Conference, especially the chair and discussant Martin Rosema. I would also like to thank Stefano Camatarri for his valuable comments. I bear full responsibility for any mistake possibly included in the article.
Declaration of conflicting interests: I declare no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding: This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
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©2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- VAAs Users’ Voting Behavior and the Role of Partisanship. Evidence from the 2014 Belgian Federal Elections
- The Impact of VAAs on (non-Voting) Aspects of Political Participation: Insights from Panel Data Collected During the 2017 German Federal Elections Campaign
- Validating and Improving Voting Advice Applications: Estimating Party Positions Using Candidate Surveys
- The Impact of Voting Advice Applications on Electoral Turnout: Evidence from Greece
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- VAAs Users’ Voting Behavior and the Role of Partisanship. Evidence from the 2014 Belgian Federal Elections
- The Impact of VAAs on (non-Voting) Aspects of Political Participation: Insights from Panel Data Collected During the 2017 German Federal Elections Campaign
- Validating and Improving Voting Advice Applications: Estimating Party Positions Using Candidate Surveys
- The Impact of Voting Advice Applications on Electoral Turnout: Evidence from Greece
