Online voting advice applications (VAAs), which help voters to decide in elections, have become commonplace in many European countries. However, their use and reliability is under-researched. This paper analyses the data generated by a VAA deployed in the run-up to the May 2007 general election in Ireland. The website was designed to allow users to compare their own placement on a number of policy dimensions with those of the main parties competing in the election. We compare the users of the website to the population in terms of their overall demographic characteristics and policy preferences, and examine the extent to which the advice issued by the website corresponded to users' stated voting intentions. The findings indicate that the VAA attracted users that were not representative of the wider population. Furthermore, we find that the supporters of the two main centre-right parties in Ireland (Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael) were less likely to be correctly identified by the application than supporters of the other parties. While VAAs offer the potential to improve the quality of democratic participation, the findings reported here also highlight a number of important challenges.

No abstract

This article addresses the factors that influenced candidates' likelihood of cybercampaigning in the 2007 Irish General Election. We consider the roles of party affiliation and support as well as intra-party competition, candidates' monetary and political resources and the marginality of the electoral race. We also provide the first empirical test to date of whether candidates' decisions to cyber-campaign are influenced by the behaviour of their direct political opponents. Monetary resources, party affiliation and the behaviour of opponents are found to have statistically significant effects on the probability of a candidate conducting a cyber-campaign.2

No abstract

No abstract