Funny Toys or Useful Tools? VAAs’ Role and Impact in Electoral Campaigns

Only a few years back Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) were often seen as interesting toys mostly used by “political nerds” rather than serious tools providing voters with valued services. However, recent research has established that not only a large portion of the voters use VAAs, but also that VAAs have a significant impact on political participation (Fivaz/Nadig 2010) and electoral decision-making (Rusuuvirta/Rosema 2009, Ladner et al. 2010, Pianzola 2014, Andreadis/Wall 2014). These studies typically applied a quite straightforward measure of VAAs’ impact: In a first step they compared the user's current party choice with the one in the previous election. In a second step, they analysed whether swing-votes were related to the user’s notion of the VAA effect on his party choice. Our paper tackles the question of the relevance of VAAs from a new and different perspective. Based on survey data we explore the importance of VAAs as information sources and decision-making aids for voters, compared to the importance voters attach to a number of alternative information sources (e.g., traditional news media, blogs, social media) or to campaigning instruments of candidates and parties (e.g., party websites, advertisements). The paper addresses the following questions: • What is the relevance attached by users to VAAs as serious information sources? • How influential are VAAs regarding the voting decision compared to other information sources and campaigning instruments (e.g., traditional media, advertisements, blogs, social media)? • Are there distinctions in the use of VAAs, media and campaigning instruments between different voter groups (e.g., gender, age, education)? Our paper uses survey data (n=11’300) from users of the Swiss VAA smartvote (www.smartvote.ch), which was collected in a post-electoral survey to the Swiss national elections in October 2015. In addition we also use data from the Swiss Electoral Study 2015 for control purposes.