Party and Candidate Strategies in Voting Advice Applications Over Time

Voting Advice Applications (VAA) have become a staple part of election campaigns over the past decade or so. In most cases there is strong engagement with the VAA from the side of candidates and it is a tool much used by voters. However, two questions are still somewhat open. First, what is the extent to which political parties and candidates change their behaviour in VAA answers over time, i.e. is there a standardisation of answers as VAA have become the norm? Second, is there a benefit for candidates in taking a different position to that of their party and have this benefit changed over time? Examining these questions over time is important to understand how political parties and candidates view these factors and whether has been a change. In order to fully gauge the effect over time it is necessary to study this in a setting where there is variation in the type of parties running, e.g. office vs policy seeking, mainstream vs niche, old vs new, and whether the type of election matter, e.g. general vs local. The case of Denmark provides all of this variation and using data from VAA from the Danish General Election of 2011, 2015 and 2019 and Danish Local Elections 2013 and 2017, combined with official electoral data and data at the party level we examine these questions. Our findings suggest that there does appear to be a temporal effect albeit not that one that is uniform across parties. We also find that there is no discernible effect of having policy positions different from the party modal position at the general elections, but a significantly positive effect at the local level. Our findings highlight the importance of VAA as a tool for understanding party and candidate strategies and underline the impact of government levels for the difference in these strategies.