The purpose of this paper is to scrutinize the effect of Voting Advice Applications (VAA’s) on voters. The reason for analyzing this question is that VAA’s (also called election quizzes, political match making, voter compasses, vote selectors, etc.) are among the most popular Internet application used during election campaigns, and that so far little research has been done on this subject; especially concerning their possible effects. Based on data from an electronic survey conducted during the Danish parliamentary election campaign in August-September 2011 (N=1973), this paper will look at four hypotheses: 1) using VAA’s increases the turnout for groups known to have a low turnout at elections, for example the youngest age cohort, 2) that users of VAA’s are more likely than non-users to shift their vote, 3) that the use of VAA’s has a measurable effect on the vote share of some parties at the expense of others, and 4) that the use of VAA’s has a positive effect on voters internal political efficacy. Several statistical methods will be used for these analyses, among these binary logistic regression and multinominal logistic analysis (mlogit).
Keywords: Voting Advice Applications, Internet, election campaigns, voter preferences, survey.
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