Voting Advice Applications: The power of self-persuasion
Alexander H. Trechsel, Diego Garzia · SERVAL (Université de Lausanne) · 2020
This chapter deals with persuasion processes in modern elections.It focuses on the im pact of so-called Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) that are becoming ever more popular among citizens in the Western world and beyond.By matching the political preferences of voters with the supply side (i.e., parties and candidates) in the campaign, these tools af fect voters in several ways.Among others, they have a positive impact on turnout, as both observational and experimental studies could show.Furthermore, they trigger a process of self-persuasion, in which users reflect on the VAA-generated output in terms of parti san preferences, cognize these results, and change/reinforce their priors.