Issue Framing Effects in VAAs. A Randomized Field Experiment

• In Event: The Role of Candidates and Issues in Voting Behaviour

Abstract

During the election campaign for municipality elections in a large Dutch city, we studied the effects of issue framing in a large-scale field experiment using an actual and well-known Voting Advice Application (VAA). The policy statements VAA users have to indicate their opinions to, were presented along with a heading explaining the policy theme. In different versions of the statement list, we provided different headings, so that a user either sees a ‘left-wing’ heading (e.g., “social policy”) or a ‘right-wing’ heading (e.g., “finance”). By randomly assigning users to either of the versions, we tested the effect of framing statements. We found a small across-the-board effect of issue framing on opinions reported by VAA users. The findings have important implications as voting advices are calculated based on users’ answers to these statements, and the advices by VAAs are demonstrated to have effects on vote choice.

Authors

• Jasper van de Pol, University of Amsterdam / ASCoR

• Bregje Holleman, Utrecht University

• Naomi Kamoen, Utrecht U/ Tilburg U

• Andre Krouwel, VU U Amsterdam