Exploring Their Options? Tracking How Voters Actually Use Voting Advice Applications

Voting advice applications (VAAs) are a widely used tool by voters across democracies. However, we know surprisingly little about how voters actually interact with these tools in practice. Here, we track the objective usage behavior of a consenting and representative sample of voters in an online VAA in Denmark. This enables us to identify the extent to which VAA users explore their positional congruence with more than one of their electoral options as well as how much time they spend doing so. Using this data, we find that a majority of users focus on their own party, but also that a substantial number of users explore other party options and spend significant time doing so. Moreover, these patterns are conditioned by vote choice certainty and political interest. Undecided and uncertain voters are more likely to explore multiple party options, and politically interested users engage with these features as well. The results have important implications for research on VAA effects, which has so far predominantly focused on VAA advice but not on the potential impact of other VAA functionalities. Moreover, the implication for practitioners is that there is a demand for VAA functions that allow users to obtain more nuanced information than merely the voting advice.