Voting Advice Applications in Europe – Transnational Practices and Comparative Perspectives

The group of online tools labelled Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) serves voters to compare their policy preferences on major issues with the stances of political parties/candidates on these policies. VAAs have become a widespread phenomenon with-in electoral campaigns in Europe – on the national as well as on the transnational level. For the European Elections 2019 (i.e. for the third time after 2009 and 2014), several transnational Voting Advice Applications will be deployed – providing an abundance of comparative data on the making of, the design and effects of these tools. Additionally, VAAs will be developed for national and sub-national elections, too, allowing for comparative analyses across countries and across levels as well as for instructive case studies. As they have been established in many European countries and for the elections of the European Parliament – and as they are used intensively by voters – VAAs have started to constitute a field of social science research resulting in national research projects, publications and European networking. In the last years, a progressive interest has arisen with respect to the consistency and reliability of the voting advice provided by these applications. Additionally, the impressive numbers of users visiting VAA-websites during election campaigns have led political scientists to research the effects of these tools on users’ electoral behaviour. Finally, VAAs have started to become a topic of democratic theory. The Panels of the Section address the role of VAAs in European democracies and the European Union; they bridge VAA research to central fields of political science such as electoral studies, party research, and democratic theory. The Section is a follow-up of the successful General Conference Sections in Bordeaux (2013), Glasgow (2014), Montreal (2015), Prague (2016), Oslo (2017) and Hamburg (2018) dedicated to VAA research. The panels of the section provide a platform to ex-change the findings of VAA research with research from other fields of political science. This time the empirical focus is set on comparative analyses of VAA usage across Europe. Additionally, the section serves as the first opportunity to exchange research findings on the implementation and usage of VAAs during the European Elections in May 2019. The Section is endorsed by the ECPR Research Network on Voting Advice Applications.