Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are online tools that match voter’s opinions on political issues to standpoints of political parties. In election time, about half of the electorate in the Netherlands turns to a VAA for a voting advice. This suggests that VAAs may have a huge influence on such factors as political knowledge, motivation to vote and voting intentions. In this research, we investigated how VAA users perceived the effects of VAAs in the 2012 Dutch national elections. In collaboration with one of the largest Dutch VAAs (KiesKompas), we collected data about user’s perceptions on the effect of VAAs on political knowledge, motivation to go voting, and voting intentions. This way done by inviting all users of KiesKompas to fill out a survey at two points in time, immediately after receiving a voting advice but before the elections, and the day after the actual elections had taken place. In these non-random, but large samples (N = 409029 and N = 9184 respectively), we explored the extent to which users feel that the VAA affected their political knowledge, motivation to go voting and voting intentions. In addition, we run regression analyses to explore which particular subgroups felt that they were affected relatively the most by the VAA. Results show, among other things, the prime reason to use a VAA has a large effect on the perceived increase in knowledge users experience: users who see a VAA as a fun test experience a smaller increase in political knowledge as compared to users who claim they use the VAA as a serious advice instrument.
