Matching Voters with Parties and Candidates: Voting Advice Applications in a Comparative Perspective

Voting Advice Applications [VAAs] have become a widespread phenomenon within electoral campaigns in Europe, attracting growing interest from citizens and parties. These popular online tools are designed to help voters to compare their policy preferences on major issues with the positions of political parties/candidates on these policies. The respondents fill in a web-questionnaire marking their positions on a range of policy statements; after comparing the users’ profile with that of each party, the application displays the proximity between the user and the parties. As they have been established in many countries – and as they are used intensively by voters – VAAs have started to constitute a field of social science research. Early research projects primarily concentrated on the characteristics of the users. With the growing number of voters resorting to VAAs, a progressive interest has arisen with respect to the consistency and reliability of the voting advice provided by these applications. This stream of research has resulted in several studies dealing with methodological issues such as the process of statement selection, the calculation algorithm applied and the way in which parties’ positions on the various statements are established. Additionally, the impressive numbers of users visiting VAA-websites during election campaigns have led political scientists to research effects of these tools on users’ electoral behaviour. Finally, VAAs have started to become a topic of democratic theory which asks questions about the model of citizenship implied in these tools. The panels are expected to bridge VAA research to central fields of political science such as electoral studies, party research, and democratic theory. The section will bring together scholars from different sub-fields of political science and aims to foster the linkages between these sub-disciplines and at the same time creating a more in-depth understanding of these increasingly relevant tools.