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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