Ioannis Andreadis
ABSTRACT
Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are web applications that enable voters to compare their political views with the positions of the political parties. VAAs have been used successfully in many West European countries for more than a decade, but most of the Balkan countries do not have an established VAA. The aim of this paper is to promote the use of VAAs by showing that these applications -- if they are built on high academic standards -- can become useful tools for all stakeholders: i) voters who become more knowledgeable about the positions of the parties and they can make better vote choices, ii) political parties that have the opportunity to make their views known to a part of the electorate that is not fully covered by traditional communications channels, and iii) VAA researchers who are able to gather a huge amount of data that can be used to study voters' electoral behavior.
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Index Terms
- Voting advice applications: a successful nexus between informatics and political science
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