Bregje Holleman on Voting Advice Applications

[6 June 2024] With the elections for the European Parliament on June 6th, a large part of the electorate does not feel very knowledgeable and is (therefore) hesitant to go and cast their vote. Voting Advice Applications (VAAs), such as “Stemwijzer EU”, “Kieskompas EU” or “EU and I” may be of help: filling out the 30 statements in a voting advice tool is sort of a fun test, and it ends with providing a voting advice. Bregje Holleman was interviewed by the Dutch newspaper NRC on these VAAs. The article (unfortunately behind a paywall) describes how VAAs try to make filling out their tools more appealing (eg. by going in to issues that are not per se decisions for the EU parliament to make but that are a hot issue in current Dutch politics), and more importantly, it gives advice on how to get most out of the voting advice tool: read the additional information provided in the tool to understand more about the issues discussed, or to find out why your answer to a statement differs from the party you thought you fancied, try to figure out why different VAAs provide you with different advice, and do understand the difference between ‘skip this question’ or ‘no opinion’ (if you click this answer, the issue will not be taken into account when computing your voting advice) vs. ‘neutral’ or ‘in between’ (this means you do have an opinion, it is just not fully agree nor fully disagree). VAAs are useful tools which provide you with a lot of information on party differences & viewpoints if you spend a little more time using them.