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

Abstract

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs), which provide citizens with information on the party that best represents their political preferences, are often cited as evidence of the empowering capabilities of digital tools. Aside from the informational benefits of these voter guides, observational studies have suggested a strong effect on political participation and vote choice. However, existing impact evaluations have been limited by a reliance on convenience samples, lack of random assignment, or both. This raises questions about self-selection and the precise mechanisms underlying how voters learn about politics. Here, we provide evidence from a field experiment with survey outcomes conducted with a sample of over 1,000 German citizens in the 2017 federal election campaign. Using linked panel survey and digital trace data combined with a randomized encouragement to complete a VAA, we are able to assess respondents’ compliance with treatment as well as to observe how the use of this tool affects political behavior, attitudes, media consumption, political knowledge, and even social media activity. Our findings reveal that the overwhelming consensus in favor of positive effects on turnout and vote choice should be treated with caution, as we find no such effects. Rather, we show that the actual virtue of VAAs in a complex online information environment is in increasing knowledge about parties’ positions on issues - exactly the kind of information these tools were designed to provide.

The consequences of online partisan media

“…In this article, we demonstrate a methodological framework for studying the effect of social media and the internet on individuals. By embedding a naturalistic encouragement in an online panel survey with linked digital trace data, our design achieves ecological validity without sacrificing internal validity ( 45 ). This approach does not come without costs: our intervention was necessarily a bundle, although multiple survey waves allowed us to prespecify and test for different pathways of influence.…”

Do Citizens use Sociodemographic Characteristics as Cues to Infer Candidate Issue Positions?

“…Population survey data referring to the same election show that voters with high levels of political knowledge or online media attention are more likely to state that issue positions mattered for their candidate choice (Coffé & von Schoultz, 2020). Hence, voting advice applications, like Smartvote in Switzerland (Fivaz & Nadig, 2010; Ladner et al, 2012), may assist people in finding candidates that are close to them in policy space (e.g., Heinsohn et al, 2019; Munzert et al, 2020; Schultze, 2014). Still, this does require an effort on part of the voter.…”

“…Given that many citizens already struggle to locate political parties on specific issue dimensions (Banducci et al, 2017; Dahlberg & Harteveld, 2016), it may be unrealistic to expect sufficient information on policy positions of candidates . Voting‐advice applications like the Swiss “Smartvote” (Fivaz & Nadig, 2010; Ladner et al, 2012) may offer a remedy (Munzert et al, 2020; Schultze, 2014; but see Heinsohn et al, 2019), but they require some active investment of time and effort by voters. In contrast, information regarding the sociodemographic background of a candidate is typically printed on the ballot paper along with the party affiliation.…”

Do Citizens use Sociodemographic Characteristics as Cues to Infer Candidate Issue Positions?

“…Hence, voting advice applications, like Smartvote in Switzerland (Fivaz and Nadig 2010;Ladner, Fivaz and Pianzola 2012), may assist people in finding candidates that are close to them in the policy space (e.g. Schultze 2014; Munzert et al 2020;Heinsohn et al 2019). Still, this does require an effort by the voter.…”

“…Given that many citizens already struggle to locate political parties on specific issue dimensions (Dahlberg and Harteveld 2016;Banducci, Giebler and Kritzinger 2017), sufficient information on candidates' policy positions may be unrealistic. Voting-advice applications like the Swiss "Smartvote" (Fivaz and Nadig 2010;Ladner, Fivaz and Pianzola 2012) may offer a remedy (Schultze 2014;Munzert et al 2020), but they require some active investment of time and effort by the voter. 1 In contrast, information regarding the sociodemographic background of a candidate, as printed on the ballot paper, is readily available and could serve as a low-level cue to infer the candidate position on some issue of interest (Popkin 1991;McDermott 1997McDermott , 1998Arnesen, Duell and Johannesson 2019).…”