Does the voting advice application work? Through a new field experiment during the 2024 European Parliament elections, Joris Preez, Simon Hicks and Romain Lascha There is limited evidence that voting advice applications increase voter turnout, but their recommendations have been shown to have a meaningful impact on voters’ choices.
Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are now a common feature of elections in many democracies, especially in multi-party environments. Supporters of these applications argue that they encourage voters to become more involved in the electoral process, making people more likely to turn out to vote. They also claim that by telling voters which political party they are closest to, they allow them to make better choices in elections.
However, existing studies have found mixed effects of voting advice applications on voter turnout or vote choice. Some observational studies suggest that it can increase voter turnout and lead to vote switching. However, these studies are limited by strong selection effects. That’s because people who choose to fill out a voting advice application are already likely to be better informed and more politically engaged in the first place (and may also differ on a wide range of other attributes).
A recent experimental study attempted to address these limitations by randomly assigning encouragement to specific treatment groups to complete a voting advice application. However, these experimental studies have shown limited or no effects from using voting advice applications. Nonetheless, almost all existing experiments suffer from small sample sizes and are therefore underpowered to detect what are likely to be small effects anyway.
field experiment
To improve on these existing experimental designs, we conducted the largest VAA field experiment to date (N=6,501) in three countries: Germany, Italy, and France, ahead of the European Parliament elections in June 2024.
In addition to sample size and statistical power, we improved on previous VAA experiments in two important ways. (1) Previous experiments only included a link to a voting advice application in the survey, but by including an actual VAA in the survey, we were able to: We analyze the entire dataset of VAA responses provided by survey respondents. (2) Instead of measuring voting intentions as an outcome, we conducted a two-stage panel survey conducted before and after the European Parliament elections to measure actual voting behavior in elections.
The voting advice application we used was EuroMPmatch. This is slightly different from the existing VAA. This is because the actual party positions on important issues were used, rather than the positions presented in the party manifesto or expert judgments about the party’s position. EuroMPmatch asked respondents to express their opinions on 20 issues on which members of the European Parliament voted on in the 2019-24 European Parliament, then reported how closely respondents “agreed” (by percentage of agreement) on each issue. National political parties of member countries and each political organization in Europe.
Key Results
Our main findings are: First, we found that completing the EuroMPmatch voting advice application had no statistically significant positive effect on voter turnout in the 2024 European Parliament elections. Specifically, when averaged across the three countries, we found no statistical differences in self-reported voter turnout between the treatment group of respondents (who were encouraged to complete VAAs) and the control group of respondents in the post-election survey. (People not recommended to complete VAA).
Looking at the three countries separately, we found that completing VAA had no effect on voter turnout in France and Germany. Nonetheless, in Italy, only 3 to 6 percentage points of respondents were encouraged to complete a VAA. unlikely Voter turnout was higher in elections than among those who were not encouraged to complete VAAs. This may suggest that VAA has made some Italian voters more confused about their electoral choices, but further research will be needed to test whether this is in fact the case.
Second, but we did We found that completing the EuroMPmatch VAA influenced which party respondents voted for in the election. In particular, among respondents who completed the VAA, people were more likely to vote for the national party or European political group that received the highest ‘match’ rate in the VAA. Although policy preferences are expected to be related to vote choice even without VAA, we find that large jumps in vote share growth near the top point (as illustrated in Figure 1) extend well beyond the expected linear relationship. I found that This suggests that it was actually caused by the VAA recommendations themselves.
Figure 1: Voting Advisory Application Recommendations and Voter Choice
Note: This figure shows the percentage of votes for a party (y-axis) that is almost above or below the percentage of agreement needed to be the top recommendation in the voting advice application (x-axis). A significant increase in the number of votes shown at the threshold (0 on the x-axis) indicates that the recommendation to apply voting advice had an impact on which party the respondent voted for in the election.
In summary, our findings show that voting advice applications do not increase voter mobilization, but they do enable voters to make better informed choices in elections, leading more voters to vote for the party with which they are most ideologically aligned. suggests that This makes voting advice applications particularly useful for secondary elections such as the European Parliament (or regional elections). Because many voters are understandably less knowledgeable about relevant policies than in national elections.
Please see the author’s attached document for more details. working papers.
Note: This article gives the views of the author and not the position of EUROPP (European Politics and Policy) or the London School of Economics. Main image source: Alexandros Michailidis /Shutterstock.com
