Shortcuts to Understanding Politics: Evaluating the Effect of VAAs on Ideological Party Placement Knowledge

Political awareness among citizens is vital for the functioning of contemporary democracies. Amid widespread concerns about declining levels of political knowledge, scholars have increasingly highlighted the crucial role of electoral campaigns. Within these campaigns, VAAs have come to occupy a prominent position, often attracting millions of users. This widespread adoption has motivated extensive scholarly interest in the consequences of VAA use, with particular attention to their potential impact on citizens’ knowledge of party positions on concrete policy issues. While this line of research is highly valuable, it often rests on assumptions derived from rational voter models, which presume that citizens systematically seek out information on relevant issues, evaluate them against their preferences, and ultimately select the party or candidate that best aligns with these preferences. However, due to time and resource constraints, many voters fall short of this idealized standard. Therefore, scholars have argued that inquiries into knowledge should keep this in mind, and should better reflect how citizens actually navigate the political landscape in terms of knowledge. This study extends this critique to VAA research by examining the extent to which these tools influence citizens’ knowledge of where political parties are positioned on the left–right spectrum. The ability to correctly place parties ideologically is a powerful and widely used shortcut for understanding their policy orientations: if citizens know whether a party is broadly left- or right-leaning, they can reasonably derive its stance on many concrete policy issues. Thus, approaching knowledge in this manner better aligns with the idea of the time and resource constrained voter. To examine this question, we implemented both a between-subjects experiment (n = 2,308) among 16- to 30-year-olds in Flanders (Belgium) from April 4 to 14, 2024, and a natural experiment. Crucially, in the between-subjects experiment, data collection took place immediately before the public launch of two major VAAs, allowing us to capture users’ first encounter with these tools and thereby increasing the ecological validity of our findings. Belgium offers a particularly suitable context for this investigation: VAA use is deeply embedded in its electoral culture, and the recent enfranchisement of 16-year-olds introduces a cohort of first-time voters navigating politics with limited prior experience.