Voting Advice Applications: How Useful and for Whom?

Alvarez, R. Michael; Levin, Inés; Trechsel, Alexander H.; Vassil, Kristjan

doi:10.1080/19331681.2013.873361

Cited by 23 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…1 Therefore, VAAs might be attractive to less politically interested citizens because they offer such voters an opportunity to easily make a (relatively) informed voting decision. As Alvarez, Levin, Trechsel, and Vassil (2012) found, VAAs are perceived to be most useful by people who view politics as complex. Considering users' political interest might therefore help distinguish between groups of users.…”

Section: Journal Of Information Technology and Politicsmentioning

confidence: 83%

“…Kaye and Johnson (2002) also found that users with higher efficacy were more likely to report guidance and surveillance motivations when searching for political information online, but this result may not be generalizable to the relatively new phenomenon of VAAs. In their study of Europrofiler users during the 2009 European parliamentary elections, Alvarez et al (2012) showed that those who felt less efficacious and those who were most interested rated VAAs most useful.…”

Section: Journal Of Information Technology and Politicsmentioning

confidence: 98%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Beyond Young, Highly Educated Males: A Typology of VAA Users

Pol¹,

Holleman

Kamoen

et al. 2014

Journal of Information Technology & Politics

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Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are Web tools that are used to inform increasing numbers of voters during elections. This increasing usage indicates that VAAs fulfill voters' needs, but what these needs are is unknown. Previous research has shown that such tools are primarily used by young males and highly educated citizens. This suggests that VAAs are generally used by citizens who are already well-informed about politics and may not need the assistance of a VAA to make voting decisions. To analyze the functions that VAAs have for their users, this study utilizes unique user data from a popular Dutch VAA to identify different user types according to their cognitive characteristics and motivations. A latent class analysis (LCA) resulted in three distinct user types that vary in efficacy, vote certainty, and interest: doubters, checkers, and seekers. Each group uses the VAA for different reasons at different points in time. Seekers' use of VAAs increases as Election Day approaches; less efficacious and less certain voters are more likely to use the tool to become informed.

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Section: Journal Of Information Technology and Politicsmentioning

confidence: 83%

Section: Journal Of Information Technology and Politicsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Beyond Young, Highly Educated Males: A Typology of VAA Users

Pol¹,

Holleman

Kamoen

et al. 2014

Journal of Information Technology & Politics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In asking how VAAs should be interpreted, our approach differs from empirical studies of how VAAs are in fact perceived and interpreted by their users (e.g., Alvarez et al 2013;Triga 2014).…”

mentioning

confidence: 91%

Electoral Dioramas: On the Problem of Representation in Voting Advice Applications

Fossen

Brink

2015

Representation

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Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are online tools designed to help citizens decide how to vote. They typically offer their users a representation of what is at stake in an election by matching user preferences on issues with those of parties or candidates. While the use of VAAs has boomed in recent years in both established and new democracies, this new phenomenon in the electoral landscape has received little attention from political theorists. The current academic debate is focused on epistemic aspects of the question how a VAA can adequately represent electoral politics. We argue that conceptual and normative presuppositions at play in the background of the tool are at least as important. Even a well-developed VAA does not simply reflect what is at stake in the election by neutrally passing along information. Rather, it structures political information in a way that is informed by the developers' presuppositions. Yet, these presuppositions remain hidden if we interpret the tool as a mirror that offers the user a reflection of him/herself situated within the political landscape. VAAs should therefore be understood as electoral dioramas, staged according to a contestable picture of politics.

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“…Only a very small minority of roughly seven per cent considered this feature useless. Compared to other features of the EU Profiler, this transnational comparison ranked slightly lower, though still astonishingly high, given the impossibility for Europeans to -for the moment -cast their vote for a party outside their national voting district (see Alvarez, Levin, Trechsel & Vassil, 2013).…”

Section: Explaining Active Demandmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Over 2.5 million unique users visited the website during the six weeks prior to the June 2009 elections, with almost one million complete voting advices generated. The data on parties' and users' issue positions is complemented by a user-survey that investigates extensively the sociodemographic characteristics and the political attitudes of a selected sample of users (for more details see Trechsel & Mair, 2011;Alvarez, Levin, Trechsel & Vassil, 2013).…”

Section: Figure 1 Example Of a Vaa Statement (Above); The 'Voting Admentioning

confidence: 99%