Voting Advice Applications and electoral turnout

This article examines Australian voters’ responses to asylum seeker boat arrivals during the most recent 2013 federal election campaign. We explore this issue using a mixed‐methods approach, by conducting media monitoring analytics, content analysis of Liberal Party press releases, and statistical analysis of Voting Engagement Application data. We identify the salience of the issue to the public and the media and examine the prominence of this issue in Liberal Party political messaging about asylum seekers. We then analyze voters’ attitudes to asylum seeker boat arrivals using Vox Pop Labs’ Vote Compass data (n = 438,050). The survey is of unprecedented size in Australia and contains information collected during the election campaign about citizens’ attitudes to policy issues, enabling fine‐grained analyses of voter attitudes at the electorate and subgroup level. We find voters’ attitudes toward asylum seekers, particularly in marginal electorates, impacted on vote intention. This effect is stronger among subgroup voters who care the most about that issue. These results suggest that the increase in the salience of the asylum seeker issue favored the winning Liberal Party.

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 68%

Wedge Politics: Mapping Voter Attitudes to Asylum Seekers Using Large-Scale Data During the Australian 2013 Federal Election Campaign

Carson¹,

Dufresne²,

Martin³

2016

“…Research on VAAs has developed several lines of investigation, but it mainly addresses the substantive question of VAAs’ effect on electoral behavior. Some have investigated whether VAAs can increase turnout and political engagement, showing that indeed VAAs can stimulate the political engagement of citizens (Gemenis & Rosema, ; Mahéo, ; Marschall & Schultze, ). Others have examined whether VAAs can influence users’ vote choice, which is the focus of this study.…”

Section: Voting Advice Applications: What They Are How They Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Impact of Voting Advice Applications on Electoral Preferences: A Field Experiment in the 2014 Quebec Election

Mahéo¹

2016

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) provide nonpartisan and interactive information during election campaigns, and match the policy demand of users with the political supply of parties. But do VAAs influence citizens’ electoral decisions? Do they help the undecided to form a political preference, and lead the decided to change their vote choice? This article reports a randomized field experiment to evaluate the effect of the Vote Compass, a VAA used in Quebec, on users’ electoral preferences. Given Quebec's multidimensional political space, VAAs have the potential to assist citizens in making a complex electoral decision. The results show that the VAA's users are more likely to form an electoral preference, but this is only the case in the short term among 30‐year‐olds, the higher educated, and more politically interested users. At the same time, using a VAA mostly impacts party preferences of voters in the short term: the politically uninterested and older users are more likely to change their party preferences, whereas 30‐year‐olds and politically interested users are less likely to change their initial party preference. This study provides evidence that the VAA cognitively engaged users, but not that it leads to vote switching on Election Day.

“…This type of research has shown that design choices can have a great impact on the advice that the tools generate, and that the use of spatial models leads to high demands on the data used for constructing the models that underlie the advice. Other studies have focused on the consequences of VAA usage, such as effects on political knowledge (Schultze, ), political interest (Kruikemeier, van Noort, Vliegenthart, & de Vreese, ), electoral turnout (Dinas, Trechsel, & Vassil, ; Garzia, De Angelis, & Pianzola, ; Gemenis & Rosema, ), electoral volatility (Ladner, Fivaz, & Pianzola, ), and party choice (Walgrave, Van Aelst, & Nuytemans, ; Wall, Krouwel, & Vitiello, ). Although the results are mixed, on the basis of these studies we can safely state that VAAs have an impact on voters’ behavior, both in terms of electoral turnout and in terms of party choice.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Response Scales in Voting Advice Applications: Do Different Designs Produce Different Outcomes?

Rosema¹,

Louwerse²

2016

Self Cite

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) represent popular election campaign tools in many countries, enabling voters to discover which party or candidate provides the best match with their political preferences. This article examines the effects of design choices on these tools by focusing on the response scale that is used to measure the policy positions of parties and voters. We analyze the impact of scale length on the advice generated by these tools using user data from a VAA developed for the 2014 Dutch local elections. We transform the original 101-point scale into several alternative scale formats and determine if this leads to a different voting recommendation. We also examine the suitability of alternative scales for creating spatial models, which are often employed by VAAs. We show that the response scale has a potentially profound impact on the resulting advice (with voters receiving different VAA outcomes depending on the scale length), except for voters with an extremist response style. The findings have practical implications for the design of these tools: outcomes should be presented as a preference list, rather than focusing on the "best match."