Enhancing Voting Advice Applications: Politicians’ Perspectives on Additional Contextual Information and AI Integration

Despite the popularity of voting advice applications (VAAs), users often struggle to fully understand the political statements. Since users rarely resolve these comprehension issues by searching for information outside the tool, one promising solution is to enrich VAAs with additional contextual information, either through clickable explanations in a so-called VAA+, or through a conversational agent VAA with an integrated chatbot. Responding to user-centric and normative calls for additional information in VAAs, the current study investigates how to add this information in a neutral and ethically sound way. In 20 semi-structured interviews with local politicians from two large Dutch municipalities, we explored (a) perceived acceptability and feasibility of four different types of contextual information—semantic clarifications, status quo descriptions, summaries of arguments in the political debate, and party positions—and (b) how AI could be used to disseminate this information. Discussions addressed appropriate resources, language use, and ethical concerns such as the risk of political bias. Findings show broad support for the addition of all four types of information, including summaries of pro and con arguments. Roughly half of the politicians emphasised that VAA developers should not evaluate the quality of arguments but could instead summarise the arguments as given by political parties to create concise and balanced overviews. Most politicians emphasised that implementation of AI is possible to some extent, but information must be accurate, politically neutral, and transparently sourced. This article reflects on the implications for theory and practice of future VAA development.