Can “Popularity” in VAAs Predict Electoral Success? The Favorite Candidates of smartvote Users and Their Results in the 2007 Swiss Federal Elections

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) provide advice to voters before elections and help them choose between different candidates and political parties based on political proximities. Although VAAs are now widely used throughout the world, only a small amount of scientific research has been published to date on their effect on voting behavior. Our contribution to this ongoing debate focuses on the question of whether the “popularity” of candidates on the Swiss VAA smartvote can be considered to be a predictor of their personal success in elections. In other words, are candidates who rank highest among smartvote’s voting recommendations also those who obtain the best preferential scores on election day? If that were the case, these tools, in addition to their primary role of providing information to voters, could also be used in predicting election results.