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Indirect Campaigning: Past, Present and Future of Voting Advice Applications

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The Internet and Democracy in Global Perspective

Part of the book series: Studies in Public Choice ((SIPC,volume 31))

Abstract

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) have become an integral part of many electoral campaigns in modern democracies. VAAs allow users to compare, on the Internet, their political preferences with the positions of parties and candidates prior to an election. In recent elections in Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Germany, more than a quarter of the respective electorates used such an online- tool. This contribution explains the logic behind VAAs, retraces their historical development and diffusion, discusses the most recent findings on the impact such tools can have on political behavior of citizens, as well as on political parties themselves, and finally offers a look into the future of online voting advice applications.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The EU Profiler consortium consists of the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, the Amsterdam-based company Kieskompas and the NCCR Democracy (University of Zurich/Zentrum für Demokratie Aarau)/Politools network. The project has been led by the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies (RSCAS), part of the European University Institute (EUI) and developed under the auspices of the EUI-based European Union Democracy Observatory (EUDO).

  2. 2.

    For a richer discussion of the relationship between VAAs and issue voting, see Garzia (2010).

  3. 3.

    On more than 2,300 of the issue positions coded in the EU Profiler (i.e., circa 83 % of the total) there was complete agreement between the coders and the parties themselves, while on a further 344 issues the discrepancy only stretched to one position on the scale (the difference between “completely agree” and “tend to agree,” for example, rather than between “agreement” and “disagreement”).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. European University Institute, Florence, Italy

    Diego Garzia, Alexander H. Trechsel, Kristjan Vassil & Elias Dinas

Authors
  1. Diego Garzia
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  2. Alexander H. Trechsel
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  3. Kristjan Vassil
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  4. Elias Dinas
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alexander H. Trechsel .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Social Sciences Center for the Study of Democracy, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, California, USA

    Bernard Grofman

  2. Depart. of Political and Social Sciences, European University Institute (Fiesole), Florence, Italy

    Alexander H. Trechsel

  3. Department of Political Science, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

    Mark Franklin

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Garzia, D., Trechsel, A.H., Vassil, K., Dinas, E. (2014). Indirect Campaigning: Past, Present and Future of Voting Advice Applications. In: Grofman, B., Trechsel, A., Franklin, M. (eds) The Internet and Democracy in Global Perspective. Studies in Public Choice, vol 31. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04352-4_3

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