Same but different: A typology of Voting Advice Application users in first- and second-order elections

Abstract

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) fulfill different needs for different citizens. In national elections, the majority of users can be characterized as politically sophisticated citizens who use VAAs for entertainment purposes and confirmation of their party preference, but a significant minority uses VAAs to learn about politics and make an informed vote choice. VAAs might, however, play a different role in second-order elections, since in these elections campaign dynamics and information supply are very different. In the current research, we applied latent class analysis on user data from a widely used Dutch VAA (Kieskompas) for a supranational and several subnational elections in the Netherlands, to test if an extant typology of VAA users for national elections could be replicated. We find that the typology can be replicated for most of these elections, but also that the relative size of the

EU-sentiment predicts the 2016 Dutch referendum vote on the EU’s association with Ukraine better than concerns about Russia or national discontent

“…For all analyses below, we make use of this sample. Since VAA opt-in samples tend to be non-representative of the general voting population, and are more likely to consist of male, higher educated and politically interested respondents from urban areas (van de Pol et al, 2018) and to mitigate differential nonparticipation patterns in nonprobability sampling (Etienne, 2021), the data is weighted using iterative proportional fitting (IPF) and poststratification procedures on both demographic (age, sex and education) and political variables (self-reported vote recall during the national elections in March 2012), using benchmarks of the Dutch CBS Golden Standard as well as official national election results. Inclusion of political variables in weighting procedures has been shown to be able to cut bias in half (Mercer et al, 2018).…”

The role of vote advice application in direct-democratic opinion formation: an experiment from Switzerland

“…Empirically, a large number of studies focusing on different dependent variables, such as party preferences, party choice, and electoral participation, have been conducted in various countries and produced mixed results. While some have found VAAs to have no effects or only small effects (e.g., Enyedi 2016;Israel et al 2016;Mahéo 2016;Marschall and Schmidt 2010;Ramonaite 2010;Walgrave et al 2008), others have documented more meaningful and stronger relationships (Andreadis and Wall 2014;Christensen et al 2021;Garzia et al 2014;Garzia et al 2017;Gemenis and Rosema 2014;Germann and Gemenis 2019;Kamoen et al 2015;Kamoen et al 2019;Ladner and Pianzola 2010;Munzert and Ramirez-Ruiz 2021;Pianzola et al 2019;Ruusuvirta 2010;Van de Pol et al 2019;Wall et al 2014). In the 2007 Swiss elections, for example, VAA use had a self-reported influence on the vote choices of 66.5% (Fivaz und Nadig 2010) to 70% (Ladner 2012) of their users.…”