2026-03-26
Diego Garzia, Stefan Marschall, Mathias Wessel Tromborg, Andreas Albertsen
Voting advice applications (VAAs) are widely used digital tools that match voters’ policy preferences with party or candidate positions. Since their emergence in the 1980s and rapid expansion alongside internet dissemination, VAAs have spread to more than 80 countries and generated growing academic interest. This thematic issue advances the field by analysing behavioural effects, user diversity, design innovations, including AI-driven conversational agents, and the validity of VAA-generated data. Together, the contributions demonstrate both the maturation of VAA research and its continued relevance for understanding democratic representation.
2026-02-11
Naomi Kamoen, Christine Liebrecht, Rieke van Lieshout
Voters frequently struggle to understand political attitude statements in voting advice applications (VAAs) and often invest limited effort in resolving these difficulties. Conversational agent VAAs (CAVAAs) aim to reduce the cognitive effort involved in searching for relevant information by integrating chatbots that can provide contextual support. This article presents findings from three studies comparing CAVAAs to standard VAAs without additional information (Studies 1 and 2) and to VAAs with static clickable information (VAA+, Study 3). Study 1 (N = 93) was a laboratory experiment conducted during the 2023 Dutch parliamentary elections. University students were assigned to a standard VAA or a CAVAA. The chatbot in the CAVAA was used in approximately 45% of cases, with users showing a preference for opinion-based and status quo information. Compared to the VAA, CAVAAs reduced non-directional responses to the VAA statements and increased evaluations of the tool’s usability. Moreover, users’ perceived knowledge was higher, whereas no differences were found for factual knowledge and turnout intention. Study 2 (N = 144) largely replicated these results in a field setting with a more diverse sample and showed that the effects hold across different levels of political sophistication. Study 3 (N = 159), conducted during the 2024 European elections, compared a CAVAA to a VAA+. While VAA+ users requested information more frequently, both tools received similar evaluations, and this finding was again consistent across groups of different political sophistication. In the manuscript, we discuss the implications of these findings for theory and practice.
2026-01-28
Daniela Braun, Elisa Deiss-Helbig, Theresa Gessler, Jochen Müller, Julia Wagner, Georg Wenzelburger
When studying questions of European democracy, research is still very much focused on national political actors. This can be partly explained by the fact that data on political parties’ positions toward Europe and citizens’ attitudes have been mainly collected at the national level, and because sample sizes at the regional or local levels are too small. However, political parties compete about issues related to Europe on different levels—and especially so in European border regions where the local level coincides even more strongly with the EU level. For the particular case of such inner-EU border regions, home to around one third of EU citizens, little is known about patterns of party competition and citizens’ specific demands and preferences. This study addresses this gap, using innovative data from the voting advice application VOTO, specifically designed for local elections held in Germany in 2024. Focusing on four German border regions—two on the Eastern and two on the Western border—it provides new insights into how European democracy works at the local level by examining political parties’ positions and citizens’ political preferences. In particular, the study investigates the extent to which border-specific features and party cues shape voters’ perspectives on cross-border cooperation and European integration. Our findings speak not only to insights from qualitative case studies, which tell us that citizens living in such border regions have specific preferences in terms of saliency and positions, but also to quantitative research studying Euroscepticism in European border regions.