Issue Information

First published: 8 December 2016This Special Issue resulting from a section of the 2015 European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) conference in Montreal, organized by the ECPR's official VAA Research Network, discusses the global spread and the popularity of these tools, addresses the history and different branches of VAA research, the current state of the art, and the remaining puzzles in the field. It also focuses attention on the wealth of research that is examining the effects of VAAs on political parties, candidates, and voters, as well as how VAA design choices affect the advice given to voters and their subsequent voting behavior.-- Research on Voting Advice Applications: State of the Art and Future Directions (pages 376–390), Diego Garzia and Stefan Marschall -- The Impact of Voting Advice Applications on Electoral Preferences: A Field Experiment in the 2014 Quebec Election (pages 391–411), Valérie-Anne Mahéo -- Do VAAs Encourage Issue Voting and Promissory Representation? Evidence From the Swiss Smartvote (pages 412–430), Andreas Ladner -- Response Scales in Voting Advice Applications: Do Different Designs Produce Different Outcomes? (pages 431–456), Martin Rosema and Tom Louwerse -- Cleavage Structures and Dimensions of Ideology in English Politics: Evidence From Voting Advice Application Data (pages 457–477), Jonathan Wheatley -- Wedge Politics: Mapping Voter Attitudes to Asylum Seekers Using Large-Scale Data During the Australian 2013 Federal Election Campaign (pages 478–498), Andrea Carson, Yannick Dufresne and Aaron Marti