Reducing Affective Polarization with Voting Advice Applications: A Pan-European Experiment

There is a general consensus in the literature that the level of affective polarization has been increasing dramatically in the United States. In Europe and the rest of the world, the trends are not so unambiguous, but intense partisan feelings are evident in most established democracies. Affective polarization is considered to be the most pernicious and dangerous type of political polarization, as it is associated with a wide range of far-reaching social, economic and political consequences. Moreover, affective polarization can be intensified by misperceptions. Voters tend to misperceive who are the typical supporters of political parties, and overestimate how much the voters of their out-parties dislike their in-party and its supporters, enhancing the "us vs them" mentality. Partisans are also prone to overestimate the policy disagreement, assuming that the opposing party and its supporters are ideologically more extreme than they actually are, which, in turn, heightens the animosity towards them. More recently, the focus of affective polarization research has begun to shift towards studying the potential ways of mitigating this pernicious phenomenon. One of the central approaches to this puzzle has been designing experimental treatments that correct the aforementioned misperceptions about who the supporters – and their views - of other parties are. If partisans are informed that the other side is not that negative towards their political in-group and its policies, they tend to feel less hostile towards the out-party supporters. Affective polarization decreases also when partisans learn that other parties and their supporters are ideologically not as extreme as they perceived them to be. Over the last decades, online Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) have emerged as popular tools to help reduce the complexities of the party system for the voters. Despite their prominence in many (multi)party systems, we are not aware of any attempts to use VAAs with an aim of mitigating partisan animosity. In this paper, we will address this gap and try to answer the following research question: Does using VAAs reduce affective polarization among the electorate? We theorize that increasing voters’ awareness about parties’ policy positions vis-à-vis their own stances would lead to lower levels of affective polarization. We rely on an assumption that, on average, voters perceive their policy disagreement with parties they do not like as higher than it actually is. Correcting these misperceptions should, thus, decrease the hostility towards the respective parties. We test our hypothesis with a pan-European VAA euandi that is simultaneously launched in all 27 European Union countries one month prior to the European Parliament elections that will take place in June 2024.