Voting Advice Applications and Electoral Behavior: An Overview

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) have long been considered as an interesting epiphenomenon. It is only in recent years that political scientists and sociologists have begun to study VAAs and their potential effects on users, from both an empirical and a normative point of view. The objective of this article is to take stock of the main findings from existing studies and establish a research agenda to develop a better understanding of their impact on participation and electoral preferences. More specifically, this article presents the main methodological difficulties encountered to date in measuring the impact of VAAs—mainly problems of representativeness, self-selection, and self-evaluation—and calls for the use of an experimental approach.