Nawigatory wyborcze: Czy możemy mówić o ich użyteczności w badaniach empirycznych?

Abstract

Voting Advice Applications (VAA) are becoming a more significant part of the political environment in the Western Europe. Their popularity is growing together with the number of users that employ them to receive voting advice in upcoming elections. The aim of the article is to analyse the problems related with creation and maintenance of VAAs and how it reflects on usefulness of data collected through VAA for empirical research. The article focuses on three main difficulties: (1) amount, timing, and quality of self-positioning of parties that influences the coding of the parties in preparation of the applications and consequently reliability of collected data, (2) issues with accessibility of VAAs, how it influences number of users, and how representative are results in comparison to full population of voters, and finally, (3) the increased competition that VAAs are facing and how it asks for quality control and need for cross-VAA data consolidation. To show that those problems are not unique to one country, the analysis elaborates on experiences from the Netherlands and Poland collected during work on the EU Profiler in 2009 and euandi in 2014.