Voting Advice Applications

Voting Advice Applications have gained a large popular audience over the last decades, but their design has not been studied very elaborately. These tools ask voters for their opinion on a number of salient issues in an election and then present the ‘best match’ between the user’s preferences and the policy preferences of the political parties in a country. In a number of projects, together with different colleagues I have begun to unravel these issues of VAA design. The main question of these studies is: how can we be sure that these tools provide voters with good advice?