The Hungarian Voting Advice Application 'Vokskabin' – Users, Effects and the role of the Media

The objective of the paper is to introduce the first Hungarian scientifically developed online voting advice application project Vokskabin (www.vokskabin.hu). It was established on the occasion of the Hungarian super election year 2014, when three elections - parliamentary, the European Parliament and the municipal elections – took place. As a first step the study describes the development phase of the project as well as its structure and purpose. Furthermore, it analyses the user-statistics of the answered questionnaires, generated by the online-tool, for all three Hungarian elections and for the two questionnaires “Equality of men and women in Hungary” and “Roma in Hungary” which were developed 2015 to keep the civic education aspect of Vokskabin alive and addressing politically and socially relevant issues like gender equality and minority situation, also outside the election period. The paper raises three main questions: 1. Are there any regional differences of Vokskabin users’ behavior? 2. How does Vokskabin influence the voting behavior (with focus on the electoral participation) and the political knowledge? This part of the study is based on survey questionnaires addressed to the users of Vokskabin. 3. How do media reports relating to Vokskabin influence the usage of the tool? In addition to the analysis of the statistics the paper aims to highlight the role of voting advice applications in general and the role of Vokskabin in particular, as means of civic education in the 21st century Hungarian society.