“What can vote advice applications tell us about (non) voters?”

VOTEADVICEA Marie Curie European Industrial

Doctorate Network

University – Industry Partnership

• Project Members: Susan Banducci, Gabriel Katz, Dan Stevens, Sam Vine, Andre Krouwel, Ali Carkoglu

• Raluca Popp, Laszlo Horvath, Claudia Zucca

Aims & Objectives of Partnership• 3 researchers, 3 projects• Methods & skills training –Online experiments, sample matching,

weighting, eye tracking– Also complementary skills – e.g. enterprise

skills – Industry experience – 18 months spent with

industry• Exchange of expertise and research opportunities

Voting Advice Application (VAA)

• Provides voting advice by matching voters’ policy views with candidates’/party positions

• Voters express their views on issues that reflect most salient dimension of political competition

• A formula calculate proximity of voters’ positions to the positions of the candidates

• Output of the app is a ranked list or mapping of parties/candidates proximities.

An example: VoteMatch Greece

VAA & the Study of Political Behaviour

• Users opt in (sometimes up to 40% of the electorate)– Many complete a follow-on survey– Generates a lot of data

• Immediate feedback to user– Information seeking behaviour

Research Potential

Walgrave (2014) Types of Questions• Do users follow advice, does

it influence other attitudes & behaviour?

• Do VAA change the nature of the campaign? Parties?

• Can we use the data generated to answer other social science questions? – Also, use as online panels

Do VAA influence behaviour -- Voting

• VAAs reduce the cost of getting informed • Cognitive effects in most studies (=seeking more

information)(but subjective measurement) • Effects sizes in studies vary between 3% to +20%

increase (though significance does vary)

• How is this studied? Probability samples, matching VAA samples with probability samples, subjective measures of VAA users

• Selection effects….more interested tend to use VAA

Uses of VAA data for other research questions:

• Estimate Party Positions– Alternative for manifestos and expert surveys

(congruence and voting studies)• Campaign dynamics (to replace rolling cross

sections) – massive daily samples• Approx. National Election Studies• With opt-in follow on surveys – Experiments (with eye tracker even)– Panel studies

Whether and how the quality of representation varies across electoral systems

• an aspect of the quality of representation: party-voter congruence in issue preferences

• variation across countries: proportional and majoritarian, number of political parties, length of democracy, district magnitude

• how VAAs help: • VAA generates an objective measure of representative

deficit: an image of representation in terms of party-voter issue congruence

• Kieskompas VAA EU Profiler (2009) developed for 27 EU countries -> large N comparative survey

How people can make use of the vote advice – linked to the fact that some are in higher degrees of issue congruence with their

preferred parties and some are not

– Eye-tracking study: whether and when people pay attention to all the competing parties

– most users check out the first and the last party on the recommendation list (the vote advice), but maybe those in lower congruence would need to seek extra information about other parties (= high representative deficit)

Does an application like the VAA help voters to make more informed decisions?

– people's party preferences (if any) may not be informed by what the parties stand for (issue positions)

– VAA gives this information explicitly• PTV = vote advice: can reinforce confidence in the

decision• PTV ≠ vote advice: may affect abstention OR opinion

change

How different emotions help/prevent the search for (the type and amount of) political information, and subsequent participation.

research contrasting the cognitive appraisal tendencies of fear and anger • tracking processes in the (real) campaign context• search for more empirical validation

Mumsnet.com

observational study: discussion and deliberation• text study • does (observable) fear and anger determine

the content and quality of the discussion? • do positions align well with the dimensions of

appraisal tendencies of specific emotions?

VAA usage

experimental study: eye-tracking • treatment conditions: making fear or anger

salient emotions• analyse the amount and type (counter-

attitudinal? issue-specific?) information they pay most attention (VAA output, vote advice)

VAA study 2

perception of polarization

•estimating the "true" underlying dimension of polarization perception using VAA surveys•imperfect indicators: cognitive and affective•dynamics: VAAs as daily panels (matching, weighting)

Information & Trust (VAA Study 3)

• How does trust in technology (also VAAs) influence the usefulness of them (vote choice and turnout)? What are the determinants of trust in technology?

Concluding thoughts

• Ideas for experiments on large samples…• Developing a UK Voting Advice Application for

2015