Voting Advice Applications in Europe. The State of the Art

As the rise of the internet has transformed the world of in-formation in democratic societies, so it has changed the pat-terns of political communication in Western democracies. With regard to electoral campaigns, the internet has quickly established itself as an essential medium alongside the tradi-tional media (newspapers, television). Contemporary publics can choose from a growing number of partisan websites pro-viding detailed information on the behalf of specific parties and candidates. At the same time, the interactive possibilities of the internet have generated new opportunities for accessing non-partisan sources of political information. A major innova-tion in this respect is represented by the so-called Voting Ad-vice Applications (VAAs). However, little empirical evidence has been collected so far – this lack being particu-larly evident in comparative perspective. To overcome this gap in the literature, we decided to devote our efforts to this first systematic investigation of the major country-based VAAs from all over Europe. The cases in-cluded range from established applications such as Dutch StemWijzer and German Wahl-O-Mat to ‘first attempts’ from Southern and Eastern Europe, in order to portray in detail the various stages of development of the VAA-phenomenon around the continent. The time-point under analysis is, in each case, the European election of June 2009. The second-order nature of this electoral competition – where voters are thought to vote for parties closer to their preferences and ideological outlook – seems in fact an ideal context to assess the potential of such applica-tions.