The effects of VAAs on users’ voting behaviour: An overview

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are becoming a widespread feature of electoral campaigns in Europe, thus at-tracting a growing interest from journalists, commentators, and – more recently – political scientists. VAAs help users casting a vote by comparing their policy preferences on ma-jor issues with the programmatic stands of political parties on such issues. The mechanism employed is rather straight-forward: the respondents fill in a web-questionnaire with their opinion on a wide range of policies; after comparing the user’s profile with that of each party, the application produces a sort of advice under the form of a rank-ordered list, at the top of which stands the party closest to the user’s policy preferences. To get a raw picture of the spread of VAAs around the continent, Walgrave et al. (2008a) sur-veyed a large sample of European political scientists: as they find out, in 2007 there was (at least) one voting advisor running in 15 countries out of the 22 surveyed. The numbers are impressive: to mention just a few, suffice to say that in 2006 the Dutch StemWijzer counted some 4.7 million advices given (equal to roughly 40 percent of the Dutch electorate), while three years later the German Wahl-O-Mat reached 6.7 million users (12 percent of the eligible voters in the country). The widespread diffusion (in terms of countries) and popularity (in terms of users) of these tools is obviously linked with the rise of internet. On the one hand, technological developments made easier the production of VAAs; on the other hand, the pervasive dif-fusion of the medium rendered them accessible to a huge number of potential users without serious effort. However, the internet alone cannot possibly account for VAAs’ suc-cess. Also structural political changes going on in Western publics must be taken into consideration: in particular, the erosion of cleavage-based voting (Franklin et al., 1992) and partisan alignments (Dalton and Wattenberg, 2000) aug-mented dramatically the number of floating, undecided voters (Dalton et al., 2000) and consequently the demand for guidance (or at least, advice) in the – not anymore sim-ple – act of voting.