Voting advice applications as mirrors to voters’ information-seeking behavior

Voting advice applications (VAAs) have become an integral part of electoral campaigns in many European countries. It is well-established that VAAs serve as heuristics for voters’ vote choice decision. Despite VAAs’ increasing popularity, little is known about how voters use these applications. This paper investigates voters’ VAA usage. The paper utilizes one of Finland’s most popular VAA’s anonymized usage data that contains information for over 700,000 VAA sessions. Due to the sensitivity of voters’ political opinions, the usage data does not contain answers to VAA statements, nor one can identify recommended candidates or parties. The non-sensitive meta-data allows for an investigation in voters’ information-seeking behavior. We complement the usage data with a post-VAA survey (n= 10,900). In terms of users’ answering behavior (input), we analyze whether voters spend more time in answering statements regarding policy issues than political values. In terms of users’ VAA recommendation familiarization (output), we investigate how many candidate profiles are visited per session and how much time is spent on each candidate on average.