The Design of Voting Advice Applications: Theoretical Background and Methodological Challenges

Abstract

Even though Voting Advice Applications have been around for more than 25 years, the stability and consistency in their design is particularly surprising. VAAs designed today often look nearly identical to VAAs designed more than a decade ago. The purpose of this panel is to evaluate and challenge some of the established practices, and explore the implications for the quality of recommendations generated by VAAs. The panel therefore invites papers that focus, among other things, on the various methods used in VAAs to a) select, phrase, and frame questions, b) estimate the positions of parties and candidates, c) match users to parties or candidates, and d) visualize the results. Papers that create links between the methods used in VAAs and other areas of research, presentations of innovations in terms of design, and studies that compare the different methods based on randomized experiments are particularly welcome.