Can Parties Mobilize Voters over Digitalization Issues? A Field Experiment with a Voting Advice Application

The increasingly rapid adoption of digital technologies affects almost every facet of life, from how we interact in our private sphere to the labour market or our relations with the administration. Despite the vast societal impact of digitalization, political parties have been reluctant to politicize digitalization-related issues. However, the irruption of ChatGPT and other Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools has raised the salience of the impact of digitalization among the public, and it threatens to jump into the political sphere. Given the increased likelihood of digitalization becoming politically central in the coming years, this paper asks whether parties can mobilize voters on digitalization issues. To this end, it introduces a novel experiment that manipulates the visibility of parties' positions on digitalization issues using different versions of a non-publicly released Voting Advice Application (VAA) tailored explicitly to this study. The experiment was conducted during a panel survey around the 2023 Swiss Federal elections. It randomized exposure to different VAAs, which only differed in the content of their statements, focusing either on traditional or digitalization-related issues. With this recently collected data, we will test whether digitalization affects political preferences and behaviour vis-a-vis traditional socio-economic and cultural issues. Overall, this paper contributes on two fronts. First, it explores the capacity of new vs old issues to structure political behaviour and will specifically shed light on the political potential of digitalization. Second, it introduces a novel experimental design using a VAA to manipulate the visibility of different political issues, thus exploiting this tool instrumentally for research purposes rather than to identify the effect of VAA use.