OKOS SZAVAZÁS ÉS PROVOKÁLT RÉSZVÉTEL
SMART VOTING AND PROVOKED PARTICIPATION

Summary/Abstract: Voting Advice Applications are increasingly popular across Europe. Their ways of functioning and their impact on attitudes and voting behaviour are still little explored. The article gives an overview of the state-of-the-art, and then reports about a new Hungarian experiment. In the framework of a panel study subjects fi rst fi lled in a questionnaire, then some of them were sent to two smart vote portals, to Szavazatszonda and to Valasztasi Iranytű. Some received advice from both, some from one, the control group visited none. In the second wave the subjective impressions of the VAA-users were collected. After the elections, in the third wave, the subjects were asked whether they voted and if yes then for which party. The unprecedentedly complex experiment proved that the two VAA projects, in spite of the many differences in their structure, provided visitors with roughly similar pieces of advice. As far as the minor differences are concerned, the different proportions of pro-Jobbik advice were explained by the thematic composition of the questionnaires. According to the subjective recollections seven per cent of the users changed their vote intentions due to the received advice. But the third wave of the panel study failed to confi rm the existence of such an impact, and there was no proof for the mobilizing or demobilizing effect either. It turned out, however, that those who received identical advice from the two websites went to vote in signifi cantly higher numbers.

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