Voting Advice Applications and Voting Behaviour: Within or Between Party Effects?

The increased popularity of voting advice applications raises interesting questions regarding their effects. This paper asks whether and how voters are influenced by the information provided by VAAs. Specifically, it analyzes whether and how partisanship mediates the effects of VAAs on voting behavior. To do so we have designed an internet-based mass survey that will direct respondents to the main Danish VAA before the next parliamentary election (June 17th at the latest) in order to analyze whether and how voters update their political preferences when they are exposed to information from the VAA about the positions of parliamentary candidates. We expect that the VAA effect will be conditional on respondent partisanship: VAA information about candidate positions will cause partisan identifiers to update their candidate preference within their preferred party, but it will also cause independents to change their candidate preferences between parties. In order to see whether these preferences also influence voting behavior, we will field another survey immediately after the election with the same respondents to see if they voted according to their updated candidate preferences. The findings have important implications for the parliamentary system of representation as well as for VAA practitioners.