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Behind the curtain of voting advice applications

An overview attributes of voting advice applications and their setups

Summary/Abstract: Voting advice applications (VAAs) are extremely fast growing phenomenon, which has become an inherent part of political campaigning and politics. The discussion about the variability of their internal mechanical setup and its relevance for determining the quality of generated voting advices is almost completely absent. This paper fills the blank space and summarizes and systematizes current knowledge about the consequences of the different setups of particular mechanical attributes of VAAs. The article analyzes the position of the authors of VAAs during the creation of the application and eight areas in which they have to choose one of the options that is crucially determining the resulting quality of their applications: (1) amount of the statements and their proper formulation/wording, (2) the means for selection of included issues and statements, (3) selection of the included political subjects, (4) means for party positioning in political space, (5) the calculation method used for generating voting advices, (6) the answer pattern offered to users, (7) possibility of assigning saliency for particular policy areas, and (8) the ways of presenting the results to users. All the options within the above mentioned areas are analyzed with the aim to their possible consequences for the quality of generated voting advices.

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