Voting advice applications : how useful and for whom?

Abstract

The use of voting advice applications (VAAs) has increased steadily in recent years. VAAs have been developed for elections taking place in individual countries as well as for region-wide European Union elections. In this article, we study the determinants of the perceived usefulness of VAAs for their users, with data from the EU Profiler—a voting advice application developed by the European Union Democracy Observatory (EUDO) that was first applied to the 2009 European Parliamentary elections. We use a multilevel latent variable approach that allows us to study underlying evaluations based on ratings of multiple features of the EU Profiler, taking into account country-level heterogeneity in evaluations of the system. The results of this study improve our understanding of the benefits of VAAs for different segments of the population, and should be of interest to scholars and policy-makers who are interested in improving the experience of individuals who use VAAs to inform their voting decisions.