“Candidate-Centered” Voting Advice Applications: State of Play and Potential for Research

Whilst existing literature on VAAs (Voting Advice Applications) tends to focus on those tools that help users position themselves with regard to parties, this article invites the reader to take a closer look at the scientific potential of “candidate-centered VAAs,” which have grown in number and enable voters to compare their positions with those of the candidates. It presents two scientific areas where this data can be particularly useful. First, it discusses the attraction exerted by VAAs on candidates as well as their influence on the personalization of electoral campaigns by analyzing the extent to which those new tools are adopted by candidates at the time of their introduction in Switzerland and Luxembourg. Second, through concrete examples from the Luxembourg VAA (smartvote.lu), it shows how it is possible—thanks to the massive collection of detailed policy positions of candidates—to study a series of classical matters related to electoral choice, political representation, intra-party cohesion and the extent to which elected officials keep their pre-election promises. For all these questions, candidate-centered VAAs can provide political scientists new data that can be quite difficult to obtain with conventional search tools. In particular, these VAAs can complement or even become an alternative to candidates’ post-election surveys that generally suffer from a relatively low response rate.