Spatial models in voting advice applications
Introduction
Studies have shown that Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) play a substantial role in shaping voters' perceptions of the positions of political parties (see other articles in this symposium). Voters and politicians take the information these tools provide seriously. This places a strong obligation of VAA creators to carefully examine their design choices. Research has shown that differences in statement selection and the method to calculate results have a large impact on the advice users receive (Louwerse and Rosema, 2013, Lefevere and Walgrave, 2014). This makes it pivotal to study the reliability of VAA design. This article examines the spatial models underlying VAAs.
Some VAAs provide advice by asking respondents' opinions on a number of statements and calculating the number of matches between a user and a number of parties. More recently, VAAs have started to use spatial modelling techniques derived from economic and political science in an attempt to use “scientifically approved methods” to place political parties (cited in Fossen and Anderson, 2014). Examples of these VAAs include the series of ‘electoral compasses’ (such as Kieskompas, Bússola Eleitoral and Valkompass), the EU Profiler and Smartvote. These VAAs do not just inform citizens about their policy match with each party, but also provide insight into the positions of political parties in (a representation of) the political space. These tools provide citizens the option of exploring their agreement with parties more precisely but primarily presents the ‘match’ as closest party in the spatial models.1 The creators of these VAAs usually provide only a very generalized justification for the choice of their underlying spatial model. In most cases, designers do not base their selection of which dimensions to include in their spatial model (such as left–right and progressive–conservative) on empirical patterns in the data (Costa Lobo et al., 2010).
This article aims to test whether the spatial models used in VAAs meet basic scientific standards. We specifically examine whether the spatial representations offer a valid depiction of policy differences between parties. We examine the spatial models of ten national VAAs, both in developed democracies such as Canada, as well as transitional democracies such as Tunisia.
The article is organized as follows. First, we discuss the use of spatial models in VAAs and the theoretical grounds for their usage. Second, we introduce our case selection of ten VAAs from the ‘electoral compass’ stable and outline their design. We examine the scalability of the various electoral compass dimensions and explore the inductive creation of models that fit parties' positions better. Results show that the scalability of the left–right scale is moderate to strong in most countries, but the scalability of the progressive–conservative scale is poor. Moreover, there is only a moderate fit between the model used in the electoral compasses and inductive models derived from parties' actual answers to the statements. This has significant implications for the status of the advice these applications provide, as the models in which voters and parties are placed are poorly specified and therefore it is unclear whether they are substantively meaningful.
Section snippets
The use of spatial models in VAAs
VAAs collect and represent party positions in different ways. One group of VAAs, including the Walh-O-Mat asks parties to indicate their position on about 30 statements. The VAA compares the answers of the users to the parties' responses and counts the number of ‘matches’ between the answers of the user and the parties. These VAAs do not explicitly use a spatial model, although one could argue that they implicitly use a high-dimensional conception of the political space (Louwerse and Rosema,
Spatial modelling
The spatial representations used in VAAs originate from a long-standing tradition of spatial modelling in the political science literature (Downs, 1957). Sometimes described as the “workhorse theory” of the study of politics (Cox, 2001: 189), spatial models have been used in electoral research, legislative studies, political communication and many other fields. The underlying assumption of spatial modelling is that parties do not pick their issue positions at random, but that there is an
Research design
One prominent example of a VAA that uses spatial models is the Kieskompas. Its designer has, in cooperation with country specialists, developed ‘electoral compasses’ for more than ten countries.5
Scalability
The first aspect we examine is the extent to which the selected statements form a consistent scale. The coefficients of homogeneity of the left–right and progressive–conservative dimensions are displayed in Table 2. In all countries except the Netherlands the H-coefficient is higher for the left–right than for the progressive–conservative dimension. The average H-coefficient of the left–right dimensions is ‘strong’, while the average scalability of the progressive–conservative dimensions is
Dimensionality
Given that political parties may not always answer questions in the way that we expect theoretically, it may be useful to look at the models from an inductive perspective. While we do not argue that VAA models should be based solely on an inductive analysis of parties (or voter) positions on statements, it at least gives us an idea what kind of strong dimensions could be created. Moreover, it provides an opportunity to see whether ‘flipping’ items from their theoretically formulated direction
The difference that empirically based spatial design makes
The last step in our analysis consists of comparing party positions in the original electoral compass models with our inductively obtained spaces. By comparing the two we show whether different modelling choices result in substantially different configurations of parties – and potentially different voting advice. Table 4 presents Pearson's coefficients of correlation between parties' positions on the two electoral compass scales (left–right and progressive–conservative) and their positions on
Conclusion
We argue that in addition to concerns about statement wording and selection, the underlying spatial model of VAAs should be based on scientific standards. VAA-makers should ensure that the statements that are used relate empirically to the dimension they are part of and do not tap into another substantive dimension. The models used in the electoral compasses in ten different countries are based on the designers' assumptions. Earlier studies have shown that these models to not conform to the
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