Voting Advice Applications and electoral choice: A typology of effects

Many advanced democracies witness a decline of party identification and increased electoral volatility. With the rise of the Internet, Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) became available to guide people’s vote choice. This study presents a typology of effects that VAAs can have on electoral choice, which includes electoral participation as well as party or candidate choice. Regarding electoral turnout the straightforward potential effects are mobilisation and demobilisation and although both effects may exist, our literatre review suggests that the size of the former effect exceeds the size of the latter. The main effects we distinguish regarding party and candidate choice are preference formation, preference stabilisation, and preference alteration. We analyse these effects in Dutch national and provincial elections, utilising data from the Dutch Parliamentary Election Study (DPES) and data from a two-wave online panel survey collected over the course of the 2015 Dutch provincial elections campaign. We find that VAA use can indeed offer undecided citizens a cue to make their party choice (preference formation), strengthen existing party preferences (preference stabilisation), but also increases vote switching (preference change). These findings attest to the relevance of VAAs as a vote cue in a volatile electoral context. Furthermore, they imply that models of party choice would gain from incorporating VAA use as independent variable next to already used vote predictors.