Voting Advice Applications: Different elections, different impact on turnout? A comparison between European Parliament elections and national parliamentary elections in Sweden

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) have become a common feature of most election campaigns in Europe. Research has shown that VAAs can affect the electorate in numerous ways. Although several studies have found support for VAAs’ positive impact on turnout, most have only studied one type of election at the time and have mostly focused on national parliamentary elections. Moreover, the level of impact seems to vary, ranging from a few single percentage points to double-digit percentage points. Considering the wide range of the results, and the predominant focus on national parliamentary elections, we argue that it is important to investigate the level of impact of VAAs on turnout at different types of elections, in the same overall electoral system. For example, we know that voters in the same country tend to behave differently in national parliamentary elections compared to European Parliament elections, where the level of interest, knowledge, and turnout is often lower than in national parliamentary elections. Hence, our study compares the impact of VAAs on turnout in European Parliament elections and national parliamentary elections in Sweden. This paper is based on data from the Swedish National Election Studies, more specifically the Swedish parliamentary election 2018 and the European Parliament election 2019. The Swedish National Election Studies produce unique datasets with large nationally representative and validated register data. The overall findings show that VAAs did affect turnout in both elections. The difference in terms of turnout between VAA users and non-VAA users was larger during the European Parliament election 2019 compared with the Swedish parliamentary election 2018.