PROMOTING ELECTORAL TURNOUT THROUGH VOTING ADVICE APPLICATIONS? A comparative approach between the Swedish parliamentary election 2018 and the European Parliament election 2019

Abstract

As the only directly elected institution within the European Union (EU), the European Parliament (EP) elections aim to function as the clear link between the citizens and the EU. However, the EP elections are characterized by low turnout and lack of interest compared to national elections. Attempts have been implemented to increase the salience of EP elections and for the first time since 1979, turnout increased in the EP election 2019. There are various reasons for this, but one reason might be that campaign efforts aimed at promoting turnout have taken a larger role. One such campaign effort is Voting Advice Applications (VAAs). VAAs are web-based tools that match users’ opinions on political issues with opinions by parties. Previous research has found diverging results on whether VAAs influence turnout, but many studies found positive results. However, no study has investigated that the impact of VAAs might be dependent on the election. Since voters behave differently in EP elections and national elections, this further raises the question if VAAs affects turnout differently in EP elections compared to national elections. It is this research gap this thesis ought to fill. Sweden has been chosen as the case of interest and more precisely the Swedish parliamentary election 2018 and the EP election 2019. The findings showed that VAAs did affect turnout in both elections, but that the difference in terms of turnout between VAA users and non-VAA users was larger during the EP election 2019 compared with the Swedish parliamentary election 2018.