Objective
Over the last two decades, Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) have spread throughout Europe and beyond. By allowing voters to compare their preferences with those of parties and candidates running for an election over a range of policy issues on a single online platform, they reduce the costs to voters associated with the gathering and processing of electoral information. Often provided by civic education agencies or academics and generally benefitting from wide media coverage, these tools have by now become a vital part of online election campaigns worldwide, being used by dozens of millions of voters.
Social science research, mostly done by political scientists, has already addressed several aspects of these digital platforms that aim at increasing informed and critical public participation in the electoral process. In this workshop, we take stock of existing and ongoing studies on the design of VAAs, the impact they have on political interest, knowledge but also on voting behaviour, as well as the potential of the wealth of VAA-generated data for research on representation, party politics and public policies. In addition to presenting innovative research on VAAs by politicial scientists, this workshop benefits from the recent and welcome input of communication scholars, computer scientists and economists to this burgeoning field.
The first panel is dedicated to the role of VAAs in civic education. Contributions will present the results of ongoing cutting-edge research on the use and impact of VAAs specifically dedicated to the youth. The second panel will provide an array of the most promising ways to improve the efficiency of VAAs and maximize user experience. On the second day we will take a tour of the candidate-based VAAs in use in Europe. Like smartwielen, which has been provided in Luxembourg since 2009, these tools allow users to find not only parties, but also individual candidates that match the most with their own positions. Presentations will highlight the specificities of each of those VAAs, the research they already contributed to, and the potential agenda for further use of these data in broader projects and in comparative perspective.