Voting Advice Applications: Methodological Innovations, Behavioural Effects, and Research Perspectives

The group of online tools labelled Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) serves voters to compare their policy preferences on major issues with the stances of political parties/candidates on these policies. VAAs have become a widespread phenomenon within electoral campaigns in Europe—on the national as well as on the transnational level. As they have been established in many European countries—and as they are used intensively by voters—VAAs have started to constitute a field of social science research resulting in national research projects, publications, and European networking. In recent years, a progressive interest has arisen with respect to the consistency and reliability of the voting advice provided by these applications. Additionally, the impressive numbers of users visiting VAA-websites during election campaigns have led political scientists to research the effects of these tools on users’ electoral behavior. Finally, VAAs have started to become a topic of democratic theory. The articles of this thematic issue address the role of VAAs in European democracies and the European Union; they bridge VAA research to central fields of political science, such as electoral studies, party research, and democratic theory.

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