Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are designed to enhance citizens’ understanding of politics, and by expressing political opinions help them pick the party or candidate that best matches these preferences. It is, however, an open question whether they succeed in this or are rather reinforcing a “digital divide” between political illiterates and political sophisticated people (Hirzalla, Van Zoonen & De Ridder, 2010; Marschall & Schulze, 2012). Previous studies of VAA users focused on socio-demographic variables and political interest (e.g. Dumont & Kies, 2012) but the present study takes into account a wide range of user characteristics to investigate different types of VAA users, and their prominences. Furthermore, we study how different types of users make use of the application differently. Do users with low levels of political understanding use the VAA more or less extensively than politically sophisticated people, and do they profit more or less from using the VAA? Employing user data from the popular Dutch VAA KiesKompas, we develop a typology of VAA users and study how user profiles relate to consistency of political attitudes and political orientation, whether the VAA increased understanding of politics, and whether they make use of additional features of the tool to look for more information after they received their results. Results suggest that users can be aligned along two main dimensions: political sophistication and electoral insecurity. We also find that political illiterates are more often unsure about their vote than politically sophisticated citizens, but fewer of them use VAAs and their understanding of politics is not always increased. A better insight into the users and usage of VAAs is imperative as such applications are consulted by increasingly large groups of voters throughout Europe prior to elections, and little is known about the influence of VAAs on their users’ understanding of politics.
