Stemadvies via het Internet: Politiek begrip in een digitale informatiemaatschappij

The central aim in our NWO ‘Comprehensible Language’ project (2012-2016)
was to investigate to what extent Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) intentionally
and unintentionally affect political knowledge and political attitudes.
In this article, we present an overview of four years of research. First, we
investigated reasons for use of VAAs, distinguishing three types of users:
checkers (well-informed, enjoying to check the VAA), seekers (looking for
political information to base their vote on) and doubters (looking for information
but cynical about politics). The proportions of these groups differ for first
vs. second order elections. Second, we investigated whether VAAs increase
users’ political knowledge. We found that users report an increase of internal
efficacy due to their VAA use, but we did not find an increase in actual political
knowledge. Third, a field experiment showed systematic effects of framing
variation on the answers to VAA assertions, which might suggest different
underlying knowledge representations. Finally, think aloud research showed
that users experience considerable problems with understanding the assertions
semantically and pragmatically, as well as with interpreting the results
screen. Additionally, we found that users view the result screen as an end
point rather than as a starting point for deliberation. We discuss some
implications for theory and practice.