The Importance of VAA Statement Selection. The Results of Two Simulations

This study examines the impact of statement selection on the output of Voting Advice Applications (VAAs). Moving beyond extant work on this topic which examines the extent to which VAA output matches the true electoral strength of parties, we focus on VAA’s ability to match voters with parties that are compatible with their preferences on the left-right spectrum. We use data from the Belgian VAA Do the Vote Test from 2007 to test the impact of statement selection on both benchmarks and find a substantial impact on the output produced regardless of the benchmarks used. Firstly, we show that statement selection affects the extent to which VAA output reflects the actual strength of political parties. Secondly, we demonstrate how the tendency of VAA builders to disperse statements across policy domains negatively affects their ability to match voters with ideologically similar parties.