Affiliations: [a] Department of Political Science, Trinity College,
Dublin | [b] Department of Political Science and Research Methods,
University of Twente | [c] FATRONIK
Correspondence:
[*]
Corresponding author: Matthew Wall, Department of Political
Science, Trinity College, Dublin, 2-3 College Green, Dublin2, Ireland. Tel.:
+353 (0)1 896 3484; E-mail: wallmt@tcd.ie
Abstract: Online voting advice applications (VAAs), which help voters to
decide in elections, have become commonplace in many European countries.
However, their use and reliability is under-researched. This paper analyses the
data generated by a VAA deployed in the run-up to the May 2007 general election
in Ireland. The website was designed to allow users to compare their own
placement on a number of policy dimensions with those of the main parties
competing in the election. We compare the users of the website to the
population in terms of their overall demographic characteristics and policy
preferences, and examine the extent to which the advice issued by the website
corresponded to users' stated voting intentions. The findings indicate that the
VAA attracted users that were not representative of the wider population.
Furthermore, we find that the supporters of the two main centre-right parties
in Ireland (Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael) were less likely to be correctly
identified by the application than supporters of the other parties. While VAAs
offer the potential to improve the quality of democratic participation, the
findings reported here also highlight a number of important challenges.
