VAA Design and Methods: Approximating Voting Behaviour or Not?

Abstract

VAAs link party positions to voters’ preferences and they provide information to an individual voter about the degree of similarity between his/her preferences and the offer of the parties. This matching exercise seems pretty straightforward but it is not. VAA builders, most of the time political scientists, need to make many design and methodological choices, and these all affect the matching outcomes. This panel tackles the design of VAAs and tests their validity. The crucial question is whether VAAs should approximate how voters make up their mind or not. Potential topics include, amongst others, the sources of information on party positions, using dimensions, weighing statements, using dichotomous or scaled questions etc. We would particularly welcome papers that address these questions in a comparative perspective.

Title	Details
Effects of Voting Advice Applications on Political Knowledge about Party Positions	View Paper Details
VAA Statement Selection and Formulation in a Comparative Perspective	View Paper Details
Matching Voters and Parties in Low Dimensional Space: The Case for a Dynamic Scale Adjustment	View Paper Details
Parties' Pledges in Voting Advice Applications and Election Programs. A Comparison for the German Federal Election 2009	View Paper Details
VAAs in New Democracies: A Different Animal or Just Even Bigger Design Problems?	View Paper Details