Faulty Recommendations? Party Positions in Online Voting Advice Applications. Wagner, M & Ruusuvirta, O In Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Toronto, Canada, 2009. abstract bibtex This paper examines the recommendations given by online voting advice applications (VAAs). These websites, which provide voting advice by matching user-entered policy views with parties’ positions, have become very popular in Europe in the past decade. In the last Dutch election, forty percent of the electorate made use of these tools. VAAs are also used heavily in Germany, Belgium, Finland, Switzerland and other countries. The advice given is thus of great political importance for opinion formation and voting behaviour, making it necessary to examine how VAAs arrive at their recommendations. This paper first establishes how VAAs conceive of party positions. We argue that the underlying logic of vote choice used by VAAs is largely a proximity-based issue-voting approach, with some elements of the directional model of voting and salience theory. Valence evaluations are not taken into account. In order to assess the accuracy of party locations encoded in these applications, we then extract policy positions from twelve VAAs in seven European countries and compare these with established left-right and economic policy measures from expert surveys and party manifestos. The VAA positions show strong convergent validity with these measures. However, the voting advice given to users may nevertheless still be limited by other sources of error arising from VAAs’ disregard of salience and valence, strategic manipulation by political parties and other VAA-specific ‘quirks’. While VAAs measure party positions relatively accurately, voters should still treat these applications as tools and guides rather than as stringent recommendations.
@inproceedings{Wagner2009,
address = {Toronto, Canada},
title = {Faulty {Recommendations}? {Party} {Positions} in {Online} {Voting} {Advice} {Applications}},
abstract = {This paper examines the recommendations given by online voting advice applications (VAAs). These websites, which provide voting advice by matching user-entered policy views with parties’ positions, have become very popular in Europe in the past decade. In the last Dutch election, forty percent of the electorate made use of these tools. VAAs are also used heavily in Germany, Belgium, Finland, Switzerland and other countries. The advice given is thus of great political importance for opinion formation and voting behaviour, making it necessary to examine how VAAs arrive at their recommendations. This paper first establishes how VAAs conceive of party positions. We argue that the underlying logic of vote choice used by VAAs is largely a proximity-based issue-voting approach, with some elements of the directional model of voting and salience theory. Valence evaluations are not taken into account. In order to assess the accuracy of party locations encoded in these applications, we then extract policy positions from twelve VAAs in seven European countries and compare these with established left-right and economic policy measures from expert surveys and party manifestos. The VAA positions show strong convergent validity with these measures. However, the voting advice given to users may nevertheless still be limited by other sources of error arising from VAAs’ disregard of salience and valence, strategic manipulation by political parties and other VAA-specific ‘quirks’. While VAAs measure party positions relatively accurately, voters should still treat these applications as tools and guides rather than as stringent recommendations.},
booktitle = {Annual {Meeting} of the {American} {Political} {Science} {Association}},
author = {Wagner, M and Ruusuvirta, O},
year = {2009},
}
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