The Impact of Voting Advice Applications on Electoral Behaviour – The case of the 2009 German Federal Election

Besides of party identification and candidate perception, issue-orientation is viewed as a major explanatory factor for the voting decision in electoral theory, most prominently in the ”Michigan-Model”. VAAs provide an instrument to address the issue-orientation of voters by offering a comparison of voters’ positions on relevant issues with those of different parties or candidates in an efficiently short time, at the end indicating which parties or candidates are closest to their political opinions taken the single policy positions together. By reducing information costs, VAAs might motivate citizens to vote and eventually to change their voting decision based on the result generated by the tool. The question dealt with in this paper is, whether playing or not playing the widely used German VAA Wahl-O-Mat had an effect on voter turnout and electoral choice at the 2009 German Federal Election independent of the demographic characteristics of the VAA users. In order to answer this question, we draw (for the first time) on an online-generated dataset provided by the German Longitudinal Election Study at the 2009 German Federal Election which is representative for the German online community. The data allows us to compare VAA users and non-users in terms of their socio-demographic background and their political attitudes. Having applied a stepwise binary logistic regression model we have found out that, controlled for the relevant socio-demographic variables, playing the Wahl-O-Mat indeed had a significant positive effect on the decision to go to the ballot boxes, but did not have a significant impact on the decision to vote for a specific party. The findings put hopes respectively fears concerning the power of VAAs to change the outcome of elections into a perspective.