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Evaluating Visualisations in Voting Advice Applications

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Abstract

While the design of voting advice applications (VAAs) is witnessing an increasing amount of attention, one aspect has until now been overlooked: its visualisations. This is remarkable, as it are those visualisations that communicate to the user the advice of the VAA. Therefore, this article aims to provide a first look at which visualisations VAAs adopt, why they adopt them, and how users comprehend them. For this, I will look at how design choices, specifically those on matching, influence the type of visualisation VAAs not only do but also have to, use. Second, I will report the results of a small-scale experiment that looked if all users comprehend similar visualisations in the same way. Here, I find that this is often not the case and that the interpretations of the users often differ. These first results suggest that VAA visualisations are wrongly underappreciated and demand closer attention of VAA designers.

Acknowledgements

Parts of this work were first presented at the ECPR General Conference, University of Hamburg (August 22–25, 2018). I would like to thank the reviewers there, as well as the anonymous reviewers of Statistics, Politics and Policy for their helpful comments. Any additional errors remain my responsibility.

Appendix

Overview of Voting Advice Applications:

Name Country Years
Educatieve Stemtest Belgium 2016
Euandi European Union 2014, 2019
iVoter Taiwan 2012, 2016
Kiesbalans The Netherlands 2017
Kieskompas The Netherlands 2006, 2010, 2012, 2017
Mainichi Japan 2009, 2012
ParteieNavi Germany 2013
Smartvote Switzerland 2011, 2015
StemWijzer The Netherlands 2006, 2010, 2012, 2017
Vaalikone Finland 2004, 2006, 2009, 2012
Vote Compass United States 2012, 2016
Wahl-O-Mat Germany 2005, 2009, 2013
Who Shall I Vote For? United Kingdom 2015
Who Should You Vote For? United Kingdom 2015

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Published Online: 2020-05-20
Published in Print: 2020-06-25

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