Article | Open Access
Voting Advice Application Use Increases Party Position Knowledge: An Experimental Study Among Belgian Youngsters
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Abstract: Political knowledge is vital for democratic citizenship, yet many voters struggle to correctly identify party positions. This article investigates whether voting advice applications (VAAs) can increase party position knowledge (PPK) among young voters. We present results from a large-scale experiment in Flanders (Belgium) using two real-world VAAs: De Stemtest, a generic VAA targeting the general electorate, and De Jongerenstemtest, a youth-oriented version specifically designed to appeal to younger citizens. Respondents aged 16–30 (N = 2,291) were randomly assigned to a control group or one of the treatment conditions. Multilevel logistic regression models demonstrate that VAA exposure does not uniformly enhance PPK: the generic VAA produced no significant learning effect, whereas the youth-oriented VAA significantly improved respondents’ ability to identify party positions correctly. Contrary to expectations, the learning effects did not vary systematically across parties or between mainstream and niche parties. Our findings provide rare causal evidence of PPK effects from real-world VAA exposure, highlighting the importance of tailoring such tools to specific audiences.
Keywords: experimental design; party position knowledge; political knowledge; survey experiment; voting advice applications; young voters
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Vol 14 (2026): Voting Advice Applications: Methodological Innovations, Behavioural Effects, and Research Perspectives (In Progress)
© Joke Matthieu, Laura Jacobs, Matthias Van Campenhout, Stefaan Walgrave. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction of the work without further permission provided the original author(s) and source are credited.