ICTs and democratic deficit in the EU: how VAA can help improve the democratization of EU institutions and practices

Ramos, Javier; Padilla, Javier; Chueca, Enrique

doi:10.1145/3129757.3129771

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 31 publications

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“…This VAA has been designed by the same developers that most of the previous applications and their design are very similar regarding the critical points that we want to probe. Its data has been used for many other studies [Mendez, 2017, Ramos et al, 2017. We have analyzed the results in eight countries: Spain, the Netherlands, France, Germany, United Kingdom, Poland, Sweden, Portugal, and Denmark.…”

Section: Vaas Selectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A normative set of criteria to increase political competence through voting advice applications

Padilla

Ramos

Romero³

et al. 2021

IJEG

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Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) have proliferated in the last years in many European countries, and their effects have been extensively discussed. One of their main objectives is to increase voter's political competence by notifying users of their closest political party according to their own preferences. In order to do this, VAAs compare and aggregate users' and political parties' preferences on a set of policy issues. The main goal of this paper is to argue that current VAAs do not fulfill their stated aims. First, we discuss the notion of political competence advanced by VAAs. Second, we define four normative criteria to evaluate whether their methods of recommendation are likely to increase voters' political competence: informativeness, respect for users' way of comparing and aggregating policy issues, reliability, and transparency. Third, we argue that current VAAs compare and aggregate users' and parties' policy preferences following a weak method. It fails to respect sufficiently the users' way of comparing and aggregating policy issues and is not reliable. To prove it, we analyze the methodology of currents VAAs and use the outcomes from the EU-Vox 2014 in several countries. Fourth, we discuss the two possibilities by which VAAs could improve these problems: 1) by using ex-ante survey data to fill their gaps 2) by creating a learning algorithm to adapt the VAA to users' preferences. We found that some changes need to be made if VAAs aim to have an impact on users' political competence.

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Section: Vaas Selectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A normative set of criteria to increase political competence through voting advice applications

Padilla

Ramos

Romero³

et al. 2021

IJEG

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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EU institutions and ICT: a new challenge in transparency and dialogue with citizens

Leite¹

2021

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Purpose This paper starts by presenting a theoretical framework based on the evolution of this problem through the EU treaties and a literature review. The focus is then turned to the role of some European institutions, namely, the European Parliament, through the Committee on Petitions, and the European Ombudsman for their close relationship: the information and communications technology (ICT)channels that introduced new mechanisms of communication and information; and what level of use this system of dialogue assures citizens’ rights to petition and to complain. Design/methodology/approach The first decades of the history of the European Union did not consider the link with citizens as a central priority in the evolution of the European integration process. The idea of Europe, built step by step, was much more dependent on the states’ political elites and bureaucratic European institutions. The democratic deficit, however, changed the perspectives of the different actors involved in the institutional framework. New initiatives were introduced alongside treaties to make the integration process more transparent and closer to European citizens. Findings Those results can be confirmed through the statistics and reports presented annually by those institutions. Originality/value Due to innovation in the use of ICT, transparency and dialogue with citizens became much more effective.

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Abstentionism, Voting Advice Applications and Voting Activation

Ramos

Padilla

Chueca

2019

Statistics, Politics and Policy

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Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) have proliferated in the last decade as part of electoral campaigns in Europe. Several studies have linked the usage of the applications to an increase in voting intention, yet the literature on the factors that make people more likely to be influenced by VAAs is not really developed. This paper tries to contribute to this literature by addressing two key questions: first, how non-institutional forms of political participation influence abstentionism among VAA users and second, how VAA encourages voting intention among these politically engaged abstentionists (activation effect). We first examine (a) whether being engaged in non-institutional forms of participation increases the likelihood of a VAA user declaring him/herself to be a voter and (b) whether being engaged in non-institutional forms of political participation has an effect on the probability of becoming a “voter” after filling in the VAA questionnaire. Our results suggest that the VAA “activation effect” nexus exists and it affects a significant percentage of abstentionist. Those users that have participated in non-institutional forms of participation – such as demonstrations or online petitions – are more likely to declare being voters before filling in the VAA. Among the abstentionists, once they answered the set of 30 key questions, a considerable percent (between 14 and 22 percent depending on the threshold used) declared to have the intention to vote (activation effect). The prevailing profile of the activated user is a young man with tertiary education. The motivational reason for voting a party also matter in increasing the probability that an “activation effect” happens. The competency of the party, its ideology, the candidate presented by the party and the users’ self-interest are also good predictors of the “activation effect.”

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ICTs and democratic deficit in the EU: how VAA can help improve the democratization of EU institutions and practices

Cited by 3 publications

References 31 publications

A normative set of criteria to increase political competence through voting advice applications

A normative set of criteria to increase political competence through voting advice applications

EU institutions and ICT: a new challenge in transparency and dialogue with citizens

Abstentionism, Voting Advice Applications and Voting Activation

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