Localising and Vocalising – Can Localising a Voting Advice Application and Combining it with Structured Discussion Amplify its Effects on Political Engagement and Participation?

One of the central concerns in the emerging literature on Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) is the influence that they exercise on their users in terms of engagement with politics and political participation. While estimates of the scale of VAA effects have ranged widely – most analyses point towards heightened levels of engagement (measured in a wide variety of ways) and participation (most typically measured in terms of turnout) amongst VAA users. As the nascent field of VAA studies has grown, so too has the sophistication with which these effects are conceptualised and measured, and it has emerged that the effects of VAAs on their users are conditioned by an array of factors, including the age and level of political engagement of users. However, little is known about the extent to which VAA effects can be conditioned by two potentially important contextual factors: localisation and discussion. Localisation describes a narrower geographic focus than most VAAs and facilitates engagement with specific, local issues that voters may find easier to engage with than more abstract, national-level issues. Integration into real-life conversation sessions involves using VAA questions and response categories to structure political discussions between voters and candidates. This paper seeks to address this lacuna in the literature by analysing a mixture of qualitative and quantitative data arising from the ‘whichcandidate.co.uk’ VAA-driven project, based in Swansea University. This project centres on a hyper-local VAA site (focusing only on issues arising in the May, 2017 Swansea Council election) with a localised traditional media campaign promoting the site. In three selected wards, the media campaign will be supplemented with a ‘ground campaign’ promoting engagement with the site and culminating in a series of three structured conversation sessions. During these sessions candidates and voters will be invited to stand on specially printed mats to indicate their positions on policy questions from the website and to take these stances as a basis on which to initiate conversations. The idea is to simulate being ‘inside a VAA’ and to see whether this experience can stimulate spontaneous conversations and interactions that allow voters to become more engaged with and likely to participate in politics. The instruments in our analysis will comprise a web-survey of site users; a ‘before and after’ survey of engagement and participation levels among those who participate in the events and a ‘follow up’ qualitative discussion with a smaller number of those who attended. The study has potentially significant implications for the future development of VAAs and particularly their potential role as a civics teaching tool that can enrich and inform political discussions in structured environments.