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Intelligent Decision Technologies pp 3–13Cite as

ArgVote: Which Party Argues Like Me? Exploring an Argument-Based Voting Advice Application

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Part of the book series: Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies ((SIST,volume 238))

Abstract

A lof of people use voting advice applications (VAAs) as a decision-making tool to assist them in deciding which political party to vote for in an election. We think that arguments for/against political positions also play an important role in this decision process, but they are not considered in classical VAAs. Therefore, we introduce a new kind of VAA, ArgVote, which considers opinions on arguments when calculating voter–party similarity. We present the results of an empirical study comprising two groups who used ArgVote with and without arguments. Our results indicate that arguments improve the understanding of political issues and different opinions, and that people enjoy the interaction with arguments. On the other hand, the matching algorithm which considers arguments was not better, and user interface improvements are needed. The user profiles we collected are provided to assist further research.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We first planned to do on-campus recruiting of participants, but this was not possible due to the lockdown at that time.

  2. 2.

    https://github.com/hhucn/argvote-dataset.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the students Marc Feger and Jan Steimann for helping with the annotation of the argumentation dataset, and Henrik Domansky, Lucas Constantin Wurthmann, and Stefan Marschall for providing valuable feedback on the study design.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Heinrich-Heine-Universität, Universitätsstraße 1, 40225, Düsseldorf, Germany

    Markus Brenneis & Martin Mauve

Authors
  1. Markus Brenneis
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  2. Martin Mauve
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Markus Brenneis .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Gdynia Maritime University, Gdynia, Poland

    Ireneusz Czarnowski

  2. Bournemouth University, Poole, UK

    Robert J. Howlett

  3. KES International, Shoreham-by-Sea, UK

    Lakhmi C. Jain

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Brenneis, M., Mauve, M. (2021). ArgVote: Which Party Argues Like Me? Exploring an Argument-Based Voting Advice Application. In: Czarnowski, I., Howlett, R.J., Jain, L.C. (eds) Intelligent Decision Technologies. Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies, vol 238. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-2765-1_1

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