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The Influence of Voting Advice Applications on Preferences, Loyalties and Turnout: an Experimental Study

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The Influence of Voting Advice Applications on Preferences, Loyalties and Turnout: an Experimental Study Article POLITICAL STUDIES: 2015 Political Studies doi: 10.1111/1467-9248.122132016, Vol. 64(4) 1000–1015 The Influence of Voting Advice © The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: ApplicationsThe Influence on ofPreferences, Voting Advice Loyalties Applications sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav on DOI: 10.1111/1467-9248.12213 andPreferences, Turnout: An Loyalties Experimental and Turnout: Study An psx.sagepub.com Experimental Study Zsolt Enyedi Central European University Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are increasingly popular, yet little is known about their impact. This article investigates their influence on party choice, party loyalty and electoral participation, relying on a complex experiment conducted before and after the 2010 Hungarian election. Participants were directed to two VAAs, some received advice from one and some from both, while the control group visited none. According to subjective recollections, 7 per cent changed their vote intentions, but according to the panel study the VAAs were unable to direct users to specific parties. Sheer exposure to the advice did not have mobilising or demobilising effects either, but preference- confirming outputs increased party loyalty while preference-disconfirming recommendations decreased it, and double exposure amplified further the impact of the VAAs. Converging advice from two different sources increased the rate of electoral participation, but more by provoking, rather than by persuading, the users. Keywords: voting advice applications; party choice; electoral participation; experiment; political parties Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) – that is, websites that identify the user’s proximity to candidates and parties based on a set of political questions – are becoming increasingly popular across Europe and have also reached North America, the Arab World and Latin America (Mendez, 2012; Wall et al., 2012). They aim to increase political knowledge, self-awareness and interest in elections and foster rational decision making. Apart from these goals, they have normatively neutral functions such as entertainment. Potentially, they can also manipulate. The more citizens use these tools, the more important it becomes for the public to know what goes on within the ‘black box’ of VAAs and what influence they have on the attitudes and behaviour of citizens. Are users stimulated to participate at elections and do they listen to the offered advice? The experiment presented below indicates that simple exposure to a VAA does not affect electoral turnout, and the number of VAA users who abandon their favourite party in order to follow the recommendations is very small. But VAAs do seem to have the power to consolidate or undermine party preferences. Those who received advice that was in line with their preferences were particularly likely to stay loyal to their party and if the preference-confirming recommendation came from two VAAs, then the level of party- switchers dropped further. Recommendations that contradicted a user’s original prefer- ences increased the number of those who abandoned their party. Finally, identical recommendations coming from the two VAAs led to a particularly high level of electoral participation – at least compared to contradictory outputs. The results indicate that under certain conditions VAAs may influence electoral behaviour but not primarily through channeling voters from one party to another. © 2015 The Author. Political Studies © 2015 Political Studies Association Enyedi2 ZSOLT ENYEDI1001 Spread, Infrastructure and Impact of VAAs The first VAA was intended to educate secondary school pupils (De Graaf, 2010), but VAAs soon became major media and scientific enterprises. In 2006, Kieskompas and StemWijzer generated more than 5 million recommendations in the Netherlands, involving more than a third of the electorate (Walgrave et al., 2008). VAAs soon spread across Europe and became particularly popular in Belgium, Germany, Finland and Swit- zerland (Louwerse and Rosema, 2011; Marschall, 2005, Nuytemans et al., 2010). Since the appearance of the EU Profiler and VoteMatch Europe in 2009, VAAs also con- tribute to the development of a pan-European political space (Threchsel and Mair, 2011). In spite of, or exactly because of, the fact that users tend to be unrepresentative of the general citizenry (i.e. they are more educated, younger and more politically active, even compared to the average internet user), political elites take VAAs seriously. In the Netherlands the VAA questionnaires are answered by a comprehensive team of party officials, sometimes including both national and European Parliament leaders (De Graaf, 2010). In Switzerland, where the websites focus on individual candidates, in 2007 about 90 per cent of future MPs answered the circulated questions. The reliability of the answers was documented by a follow-up study that showed 85 per cent of the MPs voting according to the previously provided answers (Ladner et al., 2010). Parties often get the chance to comment, justify or explain their position (Nuytemans et al., 2010). The display of supporting arguments implies that these websites can turn into platforms of persuasion and can contribute to the deliberative aspects of democracy. The structure of the questionnaire and the ways in which the answers are treated differ across the enterprises. Some VAAs give more weight to the questions considered important by the users. Some even allow the parties to rank the issues according to relevance. In Austria, both the parties and the citizens can weight individual questions (Mayer and Wassermair, 2010). The raw material on which party positions are based ranges from statements by party authorities to expert judgements or party documents, just like in mainstream political science research. Kieskompas (Krouwel et al., 2012) and the EU Profiler (Threchsel and Mair, 2011), and their later offspring, Vote Match and EUandI, rely on many data sources and on an intensive dialogue between politicians, practitioners and scholars. How user–party distance is measured also varies across the VAAs. The different algo- rithms are often based on varying assumptions about the spatial structure of party politics. Some VAAs assume a few-dimensional, simplified structure, while others treat each question as a separate dimension (Wall et al., 2012). Since VAAs provide the user with cheap and relevant information and since they highlight the differences between electoral alternatives, they are expected to boost turnout (Marschall and Schultze, 2012). Summarising experience across a number of countries, Lorella Cedroni has concluded that in countries where VAAs are well entrenched about 10 per cent of users may have been mobilised as a result of the advice (Cedroni, 2010, p. 255). Other reported figures range from 3 per cent (Ruusuvirta and Rosema, 2009) to 20 per cent (Mykkänen and Moring, 2006). © 2015 The Author. Political Studies © 2015 Political Studies Association POLITICAL STUDIES: 2015 1002 Political Studies 64 (4) VAAS ON LOYALTY, PREFERENCE AND TURNOUT 3 Voting preference change can be even larger, particularly where the choice is not only between parties but also among candidates. Accordingly, in Switzerland, a particularly large number of users (15 per cent) have claimed that they voted exactly for the list of candidates recommended by the VAA. Two thirds of the users reported some sort of impact on attitudes (Ladner et al., 2010). In Finland, 7 per cent of the respondents in 2003 and 19 per cent in 2007 acknowledged the influence of VAAs, while 15 per cent claimed to have based their electoral choice entirely on the received advice (Ruusuvirta, 2010). In Germany, 6 per cent of users reported a change in voting preferences (Marschall, 2005), and in the Netherlands, their number was estimated to be 10 per cent (Kleinnijenhuis and van Hoof, 2008). There are, however, studies that found only minimal effects. In Italy, only 2–3 per cent of users indicated that they were ready to vote for a different party or to go to vote due to the VAA experience (De Rosa, 2010). In Finland, Juri Mykkänen and Toni Moring (2006) found a mere 3 per cent vote change. In Belgium, only 1.1 per cent of the respondents acknowledged a shift in their preferences, but the panel study demonstrated that a third of this tiny group stayed loyal to their original party choice (Walgrave et al., 2008). There are reasons to be sceptical about figures indicating large-scale effects. VAA users can be expected to belong to the more informed segments of society. Informed voters tend to be resistant to information that is incompatible with their predispositions, especially at the late stage of an electoral campaign (Bartels, 1993; Zaller, 1992). Most of the existing studies are based on subjective assessments by users, often collected prior to the actual elections. Humans are notoriously bad at estimating changes in their own attitudes, and high levels of distortion were documented concerning VAAs too (Walgrave et al., 2008). While in general people tend to think that their attitudes are more stable than in reality (Markus, 1986), it is reasonable to expect those who volunteer to answer questions related to VAAs to be particularly enthusiastic and consequently prone to exaggerate the role of VAAs (Wall et al., 2014). Post-election surveys alone may not provide reliable information on the nature of the advice either. In order to measure actual attitude change induced by VAAs we need information about both pre-VAA preferences and subsequent actual electoral
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