Research on Voting Advice Applications: State of the Art and Future Directions

Abstract

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) have experienced a great deal of success over the past decade, and are now used in many countries around the world. This editorial introduces a Special Issue resulting from a section of the 2015 European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) conference in Montreal, organized by the ECPR's official VAA Research Network. It discusses the global spread and the popularity of these tools, addresses the history and different branches of VAA research, the current state of the art, and the remaining puzzles in the field. It also focuses attention on the wealth of research that is examining the effects of VAAs on political parties, candidates, and voters, as well as how VAA design choices affect the advice given to voters and their subsequent voting behavior. We hope this Special Issue will also highlight the potential of VAA-generated data for studying party positioning over time and across countries, allowing for comparative analyses of the characteristics and development of parties and party systems.KEY WORDS: Voting Advice Applications, VAA, voting, democracy, voting behavior Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) have experienced a great deal of success over the past decade. They are now used in many countries around the world, and previously isolated VAA research efforts and projects have recently been pooled in an effort to establish a research community focusing on the idea, design, and implications of these tools. This Special Issue of Policy & Internet gathers together articles first presented at a section of the 2015 European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) conference in Montreal, 1 organized by the ECPR's official VAA Research Network. By bringing together these articles we hope this Special Issue will help focus attention on the wealth of research that is examining the effects of VAAs on parties, candidates, and voters, and how VAA design choices affect the voter advice given and subsequent voter behavior. We also hope the issue will highlight the potential in VAA-generated data for studying party positioning over time and across countries, allowing for comparative analyses of the characteristics and development of parties and party systems.

Longitudinal dataset of political issue-positions of 411 parties across 28 European countries (2009–2019) from voting advice applications EU profiler and euandi

“…All three waves of the project have used the so-called iterative method to position the parties on the given list of statements. This method - first introduced by the Dutch Kieskompas in 2006 [11] – aims to maximize the strengths and alleviate the weaknesses of other commonly used party positioning techniques. The core of the iterative method consists in combining expert judgments with party self-placement.…”

“…The methodological guidelines also insist that every party position must be justified with supporting evidence from an authorized source [11] . In order to reduce the chance that a party cannot be placed on a given policy statement, the list of potential sources goes well beyond the current election manifesto.…”

The representative deficit in different European Party Systems: an analysis of the elections to the European Parliament 2009-2014

“…Indeed, the fiscal ability of the government to meet the demands of conflicting identities, even in ethnically divided societies like Belgium, has been given as an important reason for political stability (Hooghe, 2003 In this paper, we measure the political space, and hence its inherent representative deficit, in 27 different EU member states 1 , using data drawn from the EU Profiler and euandi. Although different in some respects, VAAs share a common underlying principle: they help users in their act of making a party choice and casting a vote by comparing their policy preferences on major issues with the programmatic stances of political parties on the same issues (for a review, see: Garzia and Marschall, 2016;2019). The core of every VAA that enables this comparison is a list of political issue statements formulated by the body that created the VAA, e.g., "social programs should be maintained even at the cost of higher taxes".…”

Voting Advice Applications and the Estimation of Party Positions – A Reliable Tool?

“…; Pianzola ). There is thus a growing literature interested in how the design of VAAs may affect the recommendations they give to their users (Garzia and Marschall ; Louwerse and Rosema ; Walgrave et al. ; Wagner and Ruusuvirta ).…”

“…Whether VAAs can provide reliable and valid estimates of parties' policy positions is also important for the main purpose of VAAs, which is providing political information and orientation to votersnot least because VAA recommendations may affect the opinions of quite some people in the electorate (Dumont and Kies 2012;Ladner et al 2012;Pianzola 2014). There is thus a growing literature interested in how the design of VAAs may affect the recommendations they give to their users (Garzia and Marschall 2016;Louwerse and Rosema 2014;Walgrave et al 2009;Wagner and Ruusuvirta 2012).…”