Clicking and Voting: Agenda Setting in Voting Advice Applications for the European Elections 2019

The Cabina Elettorale in Italy, Vokskabin in Hungary or the German Wahl-O-Mat. Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) have been established all over Europe in recent years and decades, some of which are used millions of times by voters to decide which party to vote for (Grazia and Marschall 2014). The idea of VAAs is based on the desire for greater political competence on the part of the electorate due to a reduction in the amount of information required (Fossen and Anderson 2014, p. 244). Against this background, our study tries to use the data of important national Voting Advice Applications for the European elections in 2019 from most EU member states in an innovative way: to identify patterns and agendas in the national electoral campaigns. One needs to be aware that although, according to Fossen and Anderson, the majority of the heavily used VAAs have a democratic theoretical foundation that refers to social choice logics (2014, p. 245), they are produced in very different ways: partly by journalists, academics or even young people which might constitute a challenge for comparison. Against this background, the article does not carry out an impact analysis of VAAs but evaluates the different thematic focusses of these online instruments in Europe. In doing so, the policy fields / topics represented in the individual VAAs and the role they play in percentage terms are surveyed. In a further step, it is possible to analyse country-by-country where politico-economic or identity-political issues tend to dominate. In this way, we can identify the focus of national campaigns and check for correlations with different party systems within the EU. By these approaches we want to go beyond prevalent patterns of VAA-research, using VAA-data to gain further insights into the different (party) dominances, national issues and Europeanization in the EU election campaigns. Besides the innovative way of using VAA-data, which will give room for further methodological considerations, we thus contribute to the debates about Second Order Campaigns in the European elections (Höller 2015) and the dominance of country-related problems. These, after all, represent an important challenge for the European Parliament and its legitimacy in addition to the right to vote.