The Impact of Voting Advice Applications on Electoral Turnout: Evidence from Greece

Gemenis Kostas ()
Additional contact information
Gemenis Kostas: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne, Germany

Statistics, Politics and Policy, 2018, vol. 9, issue 2, 161-179

Abstract: A new aspect of electoral campaigns in Europe, and increasingly elsewhere as well, has been the proliferation of the online voter information tools, widely known in the political science community as Voting Advice Applications (VAAs). By accessing VAAs, users are provided with information about the degree of congruence between their policy preferences and those of different parties or candidates. Although the exact mechanisms have not been rigorously investigated, a series of studies across European countries, such as Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Switzerland have demonstrated a link between the use of VAAs and electoral turnout. The aim of this paper is to contribute to this growing literature by analyzing previously untapped data from Greece, extending the empirical literature to a country where VAA effects have not been investigated before. The analysis indicates that the effect of VAAs in Greece is marginal to non-existent while there seems to be no evidence of the hypothesized information mechanism which purportedly drives such effects. The paper concludes with suggestions that future studies of VAA effects on turnout can address in their design.

Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/spp-2018-0011 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:statpp:v:9:y:2018:i:2:p:161-179:n:3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/spp/html

DOI: 10.1515/spp-2018-0011

Access Statistics for this article

Statistics, Politics and Policy is currently edited by Joel A. Middleton

More articles in Statistics, Politics and Policy from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().