In an increasingly digitized world, vote advice applications (VAAs) seem to be effective in providing voters with personalized information about their own positions vis-à-vis parties’ positions and specific policies. Even though electoral research has increasingly paid attention to the role VAAs play in voter’s opinion formation, very few studies have examined VAAs in the context of direct-democratic decisions. This article fills this gap by providing new insights into how VAAs affect individual decision-making in popular votes theoretically and empirically. We use novel data from the referendum campaign on the 2017 new energy law in Switzerland: a VAA experiment carried out in the framework of a three-wave panel survey. In the third wave, which took place a week before the referendum, respondents were randomly assigned to a treatment group and a control group; only the former was shown the VAA and made to use it. The results indicate two main takeaways. First, that using a VAA has a tangible effect inasmuch as the share of undecided voters is smaller among the treatment than among the control group. Second, VAA usage can have both a persuasive effect (i.e., it can change vote intentions) and an intensifying effect (i.e., it can strengthen voters’ preexisting intentions).
Mitigating climate change remains a challenge for politics since efficient instruments such as environmental taxes are widely unpopular, with one determinant of objection being a lack of knowledge. Trying to increase environmental tax acceptance, previous studies found positive, negative as well as no effects of information treatments about environmental taxes. Contributing to this inconclusive research, I apply MOSAiCH 2020 panel data from Switzerland, calculating the causal effect of receiving an environmental tax information treatment on willingness to pay them. While the information effect was inconsistent for the full sample, information significantly increases green tax acceptance of less educated people. This subgroup effect hence offers an explanation for previous inconsistencies by showing that information does not affect everyone equally. Especially for less educated people, receiving information about the functioning of environmental taxes might therefore prove crucial for policymakers to gain majority support of environmental taxes necessary for their implementation.
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