Young and Politicised: An Evaluation of VAAs’ Impact on Young University Students

Since the early 2000’s, the study of Voting Advice Applications (VAA) has been rocketing. VAAs are widely used and are very popular. Multiple studies (Aarts & van der Kolk, 2007; Enyedi, 2016; Fivaz & Nadig, 2010; Garry et. al., 2018; Laaksonen et al., 2016; Ladner et al., 2012; Mahéo, 2017; Marschall, 2008;) have shown that the use of a VAA has an impact on political attitudes and behaviour. Furthermore, the widespread use of VAAs seems to particularly impact voters that appear to be more difficult to mobilise in elections such as youth, those with lower educational levels, women and those who are socially excluded. In this exploratory study, we research the impact of the ‘Stemtest’, the Belgian VAA (designed for the 2019’s European, Federal and Regional elections in Belgium) on a specific part of the population : Young University Students. On the one hand, students are expected to be impacted by the use of a VAA because of their young age. On the other hand, their rather high level of political interest might mute the impact of VAAs. We use an experimental design to test the effects of the use of VAAs on Belgian students’ political knowledge, political attitudes and behaviour. Our results show that using a VAA does not have an impact on students’ knowledge of parties’ issue positions, or on their political attitudes. Nonetheless, the Stemtest has significant effect on students’ support for political parties