Voting advice applications between national and supranational elections

The group of online tools labelled Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) serves voters to compare their policy preferences on major issues with the stances of political par-ties/candidates on these policies. VAAs have become a widespread phenomenon with-in electoral campaigns in Europe – on the national as well as on the transnational level. For the European Elections 2024 (i.e. for the fourth time since 2009), several transnational Voting Advice Applications will be deployed – providing an abundance of comparative data on the making of, the design and effects of these tools. Additionally, VAAs will be developed for national and sub-national elections, too, allowing for comparative analyses across countries and across levels as well as for instructive case studies. As they have been established in many European countries and for the elections of the European Parliament – and as they are used intensively by voters – VAAs have started to constitute a field of social science research resulting in national research projects, publications and European networking. In the last years, a progressive interest has arisen with respect to the consistency and reliability of the voting advice provided by these applications. Additionally, the impressive numbers of users visiting VAA-websites during election campaigns have led political scientists to research the effects of these tools on users’ electoral behaviour. Finally, VAAs have started to become a topic of democratic theory. The panels of the section are expected to address the role of VAAs in European democracies and the European Union; they bridge VAA research to central fields of political science such as electoral studies, party research, and democratic theory. The section is a follow-up of the successful General Conference Sections endorsed by the ECPR Research Network on VAAs since 2013, each of which saw about 20 papers presented and 30 authors attending. The panels of the section provide a platform to ex-change the findings of VAA research with research from other fields of political science. This time the empirical focus will be set on comparative analyses of VAA usage across Europe. Additionally, the section could serve as the first opportunity to exchange re-search findings on the implementation and usage of VAAs during the European Elections in June 2024. Prospective panels: Panel 1: Analysing Effects of Voting Advice Applications on Users Literature about VAAs has already shown that the usage of these tools can affect users in many different ways. First, VAAs can affect the attitudinal dimension of electoral politics, for example motivating voters to learn more about politics and party positions. Some scholars have pointed out that after doing such tests users exhibit increased levels of political knowledge, efficacy, or interest. Furthermore, VAAs can also affect the behavioural dimension of electoral politics, motivating users to turn out in higher numbers or affecting the candidate or party choice of their vote intentions. However, many questions around the VAA effects remain, such as what explains the differences in the size of these effects across contexts, the impact of self-selection of users on the impact, and what variables moderate the effects. The aim of this panel is to bring together a set of papers that advance our insights into such attitudinal and behavioural effects of VAAs. Panel 2: The design of Voting Advice Applications: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives Despite their prominence in election campaigns, Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) of-ten prove to be particularly controversial. VAA designers often find themselves in conflict with political parties, while VAAs are sometimes forced offline due to complaints. Quite often, however, the concern for ethical issues about providing fair and unbiased "advice" to VAA users hides deeper theoretical and methodological debates. The panel therefore welcomes theoretical contributions that aim to link the design of VAAs to major voting theories, as well as empirical contributions illustrating particular advantages or pitfalls in VAA design. The panel welcomes theoretical and empirical research on these, and other related questions. Panel 3: The usability of VAA data for party research While the original intention behind constructing VAAs is to provide tools that enable voters to compare their policy positions with those of parties, giving them orientation in elections, additional strands of research around VAAs have emerged. These strands leverage the enormous potential of VAA data for party and party system research. With the help of VAA data, researchers can estimate which parties are close to or distant from each other, identify party systems with centripetal or centrifugal tendencies, pinpoint representation gaps, and much more. However, there may be concerns that data originally collected for other purposes might be unsuitable for analysing parties and party systems. This panel welcomes papers that theoretically discuss the viability of VAA data for party research and/or empirically apply VAA data to contribute to the questions outlined above. Panel 4: New directions in VAA development and research: Methodological innovations, data collection, and data sharing Since their emergence in the late 1980s, Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) have be-come a more prominent feature of electoral campaigns, especially in Europe where they are used by millions of citizens. While the number of VAA designers is increasing, many of the VAAs that are implemented today are nearly identical in terms of layout and methods to VAAs fielded more than a decade ago. Moreover, although the literature on VAAs has increased exponentially, VAA data is still handled and shared in a haphazard manner. The panel invites papers that address innovations in the design of VAAs and/or issues with regards to collecting and sharing VAA data.