The Effects of Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) on Pre-Voting Citizens: First Findings from a Field Experiment in Wallonia

Due to the transformation of political systems in liberal democracies that eventually lead to extensive depoliticization and political apathy of the mass population, today we are witnessing low levels of political knowledge, interest, trust and participation especially on the part of young citizens. For some years now, scholars also denoted youth’s lack of sense of political efficacy. Yet, the effect of the early years and early socialization has been highly recognized as determining for the formation of political attitudes and identity. In that respect, to make politics appealing to citizens at a young age is determining for their engagement in the long run and thus for the future vitality of democracy. Moreover, since the beginning of the 2017 school year, an education in philosophy and citizenship has been organized in the French community of Belgium. It is therefore expected that all schools will participate in the acquisition of a range of skills related to citizenship. To that end, high school teachers have shown their interest to use the Test électoral in the classroom. The Stemtest/Test électoral is a Voting Advice Application (VAA) providing the citizens for personalized information on their ideological profile by comparing their positions on a selection of political issues with those of parties. While several scholars agree that VAAs are interactive tools to assist young people in familiarizing themselves with political issues and ideological positions and can be used as a teaching resource for citizenship education, field research examining the effects of VAAs on young people particularly is lacking. My thesis research aims at assessing the effects of the VAAs on the sense of both – internal and external – aspects of political efficacy among pre-voting citizens aged 16 to 18. In order to isolate the effect of the use of a VAA from other variables in a natural classroom setting, I set up an original and replicable experimental design. The experiment protocol is somewhere in-between survey experiments and field experiments: A survey treatment will be part of the field intervention which has an experimental treatment embedded. Pre and post-treatment surveys enable us to draw confident inferences about what shapes attitudes and behavior and to gauge the sense of political efficacy in the subpopulation of interest. The experiment takes place in natural classroom or computer room settings with 5th and 6th-year secondary pupils in schools all across Wallonia. The sample is divided into three groups: The first group of classes is assigned use the Test électoral; The second is be administrated a survey questionnaire with the 35 same policy questions as in the VAA but without benefitting from the interactive effect of the VAA; and the last group is submitted to a questionnaire on leisure-time activities (task irrelevant to politics). This paper hence draws the first results from both descriptive and inferential analysis of the effects of VAAs on pre-voting citizens’ sense of political efficacy from a field experiment conducted in 20 high schools in Wallonia.