Voting Advice Applications and Electoral Participation: A Multi-Method Study

Abstract

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) help users casting a vote by offering an explicit ranking of viable options. The wide amount of readily available information provided by VAAs to users has been shown to contribute to reducing the transactional costs involved in gathering relevant political information. Available evidence also supports the idea that VAA users are more likely to cast a ballot in elections as a result. The extent to which electoral participation is caused by using a VAA, however, remains unclear. Against this background, we reassess the mobilizing effect of VAAs by means of a multi-method approach. Our cross-sectional analysis of 12 national election study data sets provides further support to the idea that VAA usage increases users' chances of casting a ballot in elections as compared to non-users. This conclusion is strengthened by the results of a randomized field experiment conducted in the context of the 2013 Italian parliamentary election.

Does Campaigning on Social Media Make a Difference? Evidence From Candidate Use of Twitter During the 2015 and 2017 U.K. Elections

“…While these debates largely relate to who is using the technology, Gibson and McAllister (2015) also specifically relate them to who benefits from the technology, providing evidence that green parties appeared to benefit more from using social media than their more mainstream competitors in Australian elections, a finding they relate to the fact that these voters are typically drawn from younger demographics (see Gibson & McAllister, 2015, p.542). Recent studies showing that social media have a positive impact on the youth vote seem to support this idea (Vaccari, 2017;Garzia, Trechsel, & De Angelis 2017;Aldrich, Gibson, Cantijoch & Konitzer, 2015). 2 Hence, we develop our next hypothesis: H3: Politicians from smaller parties will benefit more from campaigning on Twitter…”

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

“…Accordingly, results from the existing research on VAA effects on participation are relatively straightforward: VAA usage would seem to be systematically linked to an increased propensity to take part in elections, regardless of the methodology employed by the various available studies. In this respect, the findings stemming from early analyses of opt-in surveys of VAA users (Fivaz & Nadig, 2010;Ladner & Pianzola, 2010;Marschall, 2005;Marschall & Schmidt, 2010) are corroborated by statistical analyses of representative survey data sets Garzia, De Angelis, & Pianzola, 2014;Gemenis & Rosema, 2014;Marschall & Schultze, 2012;Pianzola, 2014) and experimental designs (Enyedi, 2015;Garzia, Trechsel, & De Angelis, 2016;Vassil, 2012).…”

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

“…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.…”