The Impact of Voting Advice Applications: Evidence from Randomized Experiments in Japan

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are civic information tools that have been used increasingly by voters in recent elections to find out which candidates and political parties they are proximate to, based on their answers to policy questions. Despite the increasing use of VAAs in today’s elections, little is known about what impact it has on voters’ choices and understanding about politics. The existing works that are mostly based on observational studies with a few exceptions have so far produced inconclusive and mixed results. To overcome the endogeneity problem and more rigorously examine VAAs’ causal effects, we conducted a randomized field experiment around the general election held in Japan in October 2021, with more than 2,800 participants, and a follow-up experiment around the general election in October 2024. In the experiment, we asked a treatment group to take our VAAs in the same manner as the public using the tool during the election campaign. Prior to and after the treatment, we asked various attitudinal questions and vote choice to participants assigned to both treatment and control groups in a panel survey conducted after the election. In the paper, we examine the effect of using VAAs on vote choice, political interest, internal political efficacy, and political satisfaction. Our initial analyses suggest that VAA does impact attitudes, but only for certain groups of voters: it benefits the less educated (primary-middle school level) and the less experienced voters (students), by making them more interested in politics (although sometimes with lower sense of internal efficacy) and in certain cases also the more politically experienced voters, by increasing their level of political satisfaction. Overall, this goes against previous research showing significant effects of VAA on political interest only for the most educated group and supports the idea that VAAs have the potential to represent a tool for civic education for those who are generally detached from the political world.