Effects of Voting Advice Applications on Political Behavior

Abstract

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) provide their users with personalized information on the extent of overlap with political parties and/or candidates in terms of policy goals. However, despite significant attention in previous literature, it remains unclear whether, and to what extent, VAAs affect political knowledge, voting preferences, electoral turnout, and other behavioral outcomes. While observational studies have generally found evidence in support of VAA effects, the evidence from experimental studies is much more mixed, suggesting that frequently cited correlational evidence on VAA effects could be spurious. Assuming that VAAs do have behavioral consequences, it also remains unclear what kinds of voters are most and least likely to be affected by VAA usage; how durable these effects are; and whether VAAs have stronger effects in some electoral contexts compared to others. Finally, causality has largely been treated as a black box in previous literature, and we therefore know only relatively little about what causal mechanisms are driving the effects of VAAs. This panel aims to bring together papers asking about the effects of VAAs on political behavior, broadly understood.

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