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

Abstract

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).

Article: ChatGPT as a voting application in direct democracy

“…In future studies, it would be important to assess whether LLMs can impact users' opinion on their voting decision and their positioning on salient arguments. Indeed, as it has been demonstrated by former studies (Colombo & Kriesi, 2017;Stadelmann-Steffen et al, 2023) party cues and other vote advice sources (such as Smartvote for elections and Easyvote for direct democracy votes in Switzerland) act as voting heuristics and play a role in citizens understanding and attitudes towards policy issues. Citizens' reliance on LLMs to forge their opinion also pursue similar goals and can, thereby, reinforce or modify voting predispositions.…”

Artificial intelligence and voting advice applications

“…The results of these studies were rather mixed, showing a positive effect of VAA usage on electoral turnout in some countries such as Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Finland, but not in others like Greece, while in Germany VAA usage was associated with information-seeking activities but not more active engagement with electoral campaigns such as attending party rallies. Another strand, looked at randomized experiments in countries and regions like Estonia (Vassil, 2011), Finland (Christensen et al, 2021), Germany (Munzert et al, 2020), Hungary (Enyedi, 2016), Italy (Garzia et al, 2017b), Japan (Tsutsumi et al, 2018), Northern Ireland (Garry et al, 2019), Quebec (Mahéo, 2016(Mahéo, , 2017, Switzerland (Pianzola et al, 2019;Stadelmann-Steffen et al, 2023), Taiwan (Liao et al, 2020), Turkey (Andı et al, 2023), Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Spain, and Great Britain (Germann et al, 2023). Again, while most studies find evidence of VAA effects on voting behavior and political participation (Garry et al, 2019;Pianzola et al, 2019;Liao et al, 2020;Christensen et al, 2021;Germann et al, 2023;Stadelmann-Steffen et al, 2023), other studies find no meaningful effects (Enyedi, 2016;Tsutsumi et al, 2018;Munzert et al, 2020), or effects that were limited to undecided (or centrist) voters (Vassil, 2011;Mahéo, 2016;Andı et al, 2023).…”