Voting Advice Applications and their Effects: Are the Goals of VAAs Fulfilled in Practice?

Abstract

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are online platforms that typically provide a list of parties ranked by their closeness to the user in terms of issue positions. These tools are built with the aim to reduce the costs of obtaining information about parties’ or candidates’ positions and they should thus favour an issue proximity vote and promote civic education. Nevertheless, it is still rather unclear to what extent the goals of VAAs are fulfilled in practice. Research has shown that VAAs’ recommendations are relevant to voters, focusing both on the quantitative and the qualitative effects of their usage. On the one hand, it seems indeed that VAAs boost electoral turnout and in some cases alter the vote choice. On the other hand, it has been shown that doing such a test increases the perceived level of political knowledge and motivates voters to collect further political information. However, the size of these effects differs across contexts and it seems that the self-selection of users can limit the impact of VAAs among groups of voters that are already more politically active. The aim of this panel is to bring together a set of papers that advance our insights into such attitudinal and behavioural effects of VAAs. Contributions focusing on the impact that VAAs have on different aspects of political attitudes and behaviour are most welcome, regardless of what type of data (e.g. VAAs user data, election surveys, or any other sources), methodology (quantitative, qualitative and/or mixed), or cases have been used in the analysis.