Abstract
A new aspect of electoral campaigns in Europe, and increasingly elsewhere as well, has been the proliferation of the online voter information tools, widely known in the political science community as Voting Advice Applications (VAAs). By accessing VAAs, users are provided with information about the degree of congruence between their policy preferences and those of different parties or candidates. Although the exact mechanisms have not been rigorously investigated, a series of studies across European countries, such as Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Switzerland have demonstrated a link between the use of VAAs and electoral turnout. The aim of this paper is to contribute to this growing literature by analyzing previously untapped data from Greece, extending the empirical literature to a country where VAA effects have not been investigated before. The analysis indicates that the effect of VAAs in Greece is marginal to non-existent while there seems to be no evidence of the hypothesized information mechanism which purportedly drives such effects. The paper concludes with suggestions that future studies of VAA effects on turnout can address in their design.
Acknowledgments
Parts of this work were supported by the framework of the Operational Program “Education and Life-long Learning” (Action “Aristeia II”), co-funded by the European Union (European Social Fund) and by national funds in Greece. Earlier versions were presented at the ECPR General Conference, University of Hamburg (August 22–25, 2018), and the ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops, University of Nicosia (April 10–14, 2018). I would like to thank Garret Binding, Fernando Mendez, Martin Rosema, Dimiter Toshkov, and the anonymous reviewers of Statistics, Politics and Policy for their helpful comments. Any errors remain my responsibility. Replication files can be accessed at the Harvard Dataverse, doi: 10.7910/DVN/KOO6MP.
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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