The Impact of Voting Advice Applications on Electoral Turnout: Evidence from Greece

Abstract

A new aspect of electoral campaigns in Europe, and increasingly elsewhere as well, has been the proliferation of the online voter information tools, widely known in the political science community as Voting Advice Applications (VAAs). By accessing VAAs, users are provided with information about the degree of congruence between their policy preferences and those of different parties or candidates. Although the exact mechanisms have not been rigorously investigated, a series of studies across European countries, such as Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Switzerland have demonstrated a link between the use of VAAs and electoral turnout. The aim of this paper is to contribute to this growing literature by analyzing previously untapped data from Greece, extending the empirical literature to a country where VAA effects have not been investigated before. The analysis indicates that the effect of VAAs in Greece is marginal to non-existent while there seems to be no evidence of the hypothesized information mechanism which purportedly drives such effects. The paper concludes with suggestions that future studies of VAA effects on turnout can address in their design.

Do Online Voter Guides Empower Citizens? Evidence from a Field Experiment with Digital Trace Data

“…Given the biases in usage as well as selection into taking the survey, early studies relying on crosssectional data suffer from lack of internal (causal) and external validity (generalizability). To counter these biases, designs have advanced over time, exploiting panel setups (e.g., Andreadis and Wall, 2014;Heinsohn et al, 2016;Walgrave, Van Aelst and Nuytemans, 2008) and implementing various forms of selection and matching methods (e.g., Gemenis, 2018;Pianzola, 2014a). More recently, a set of pioneering studies has adopted an experimental approach to identify VAA effects by randomly assigning VAA use (e.g., Enyedi, 2016;Mahéo, 2016;Vassil, 2011;Pianzola et al, 2019).…”

“…Substantively, the magnitude of the reported effects varies widely. Gemenis (2018) estimates an effect on the probability of voting in the May (June) 2012 Greek parliamentary election of 9.5 (6.2) percentage points (but no Figure 1: Summary of VAA effects studies (see Table 1 for an overview). Reported effects by outcomes, direction, and significance (at p < 0.05).…”

Artificial intelligence and voting advice applications

“…. Gemenis, 2018;Germann and Gemenis, 2019;Heinsohn et al, 2019), selection models (e.g. Garzia et al, , 2017bWall et al, 2014), difference-in-differences designs (Benesch et al, 2023), and panel data analysis (Israel et al, 2017;Manavopoulos et al, 2018;Kleinnijenhuis et al, 2019).…”

“…Pre-processing VAA data AI methods have been also used in (pre-)processing the data generated by VAA users, an area which is important inasmuch VAA user response data is used in VAA design and the evaluation of the impact of VAAs. Indeed, user response data has been used extensively to assess ex-post the effectiveness of the design (e.g., Mendez, 2012;Alvarez et al, 2014;Louwerse and Rosema, 2014) and the electoral effects (e.g., Kamoen et al, 2015;Gemenis, 2018;Germann et al, 2023) of VAAs, to train machine learning models in "social VAAs" (Katakis et al, 2013;Tsapatsoulis et al, 2015), and to dynamically calibrate VAA matching algorithms (Germann and Mendez, 2016;Romero Moreno et al, 2022).…”

What Do Pupils Learn from Voting Advice Applications in Civic Education Classes? Effects of a Digital Intervention Using Voting Advice Applications on Students’ Political Dispositions

“…In addition, gamified tools of electoral information are attributed with an increasing effect on both voting intention and actual turnout. Although methodologically very diverse, a differentiated corpus of studies in Germany but also in international contexts proves that VAA use systematically increases the probability of voter participation among its users (e.g., Fivaz and Nadig 2010;Ladner and Pianzola 2010;Marschall and Schmidt 2008;Garzia et al 2014;Gemenis and Rosema 2014;Marschall and Schultze 2012;Gemenis and Rosema 2014;Gemenis 2018;Germann and Gemenis 2019;Enyedi 2016;Garzia et al 2017;Waldvogel and Wehner 2022).…”