Volume 9, Issue 2 - Special Issue on Voting Advice Applications

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.

Thus far, research on the effects of Voting Advice Applications has focused on some aspects of voting behavior, whether, for example, these online tools impact citizens’ likelihood to vote or their voting choices. Relatively under-researched remain questions concerning the relationship between using VAAs and other forms of engagement with politics, such as involvement in electoral campaigns and information seeking about politics and parties. This paper seeks to examine effects in these behaviors associated with VAA-use employing panel data generated during and after the period of the German Bundestag Federal Election in September, 2017. The data from roughly 1120 participants, sampled to be representative of the German internet users, were collected in four waves, 1 month before the election at the earliest and several weeks following at the latest. We find that VAA-use is positively associated with consuming information about politics through other media (e.g. TV) and other election-related information-seeking activities, such as reading party programmes. On the other hand, we find no statistically significant relationship between VAA-use and interpersonal talk about politics or more active engagement with electoral campaigns such as attending party rallies.

Locating political parties correctly regarding different policy issues is not just crucial for research on parties, party competition, and many similar fields but also for the electorate. For the latter, it has become more and more important as the relevance of voting advice applications (VAA) has increased and as their main usage is to compare citizens’ policy preferences to the offer of political parties. However, if party positions are not adequately assigned, citizens are provided with suboptimal information which decreases the citizens’ capacities to make rational electoral decision. VAA designers follow different approaches to determining party positions. In this paper, we look beyond most common sources like electoral manifestos and expert judgments by using surveys of electoral candidates to validate and improve VAAs. We argue that by using positions derived from candidate surveys we get the information by the source itself, but at the same time we overcome most of the disadvantages of the other methods. Using data for the 2014 European Parliament election both in Greece and Germany, we show that while positions taken from the VAAs and from the candidate surveys do match more often than not, we also find substantive differences and even opposing positions. Moreover, these occasional differences have already rather severe consequences looking at calculated overlaps between citizens and parties as well as representations of the political competition space and party system polarization. These differences seem to be more pronounced in Greece. We conclude that candidate surveys are indeed a valid additional source to validate and improve VAAs.

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.