Photo: Nick Youngson. All rights reserved. CC BY-SA 3.0
Digital society has had an impact on all political processes. So, it should come as no surprise to discover that new applications and methodologies aiming at improving the democratic system from different perspectives are currently available. The time is right for them. Stemming from a representation and legitimacy crisis affecting institutions and parties, citizen demands have led governments to try and open new paths through which to channel these demands. They have also driven citizens to design and build their own tools to improve governance. This process is known as citizen empowerment from digitization.
Two elements contribute to this empowerment. First, the political crisis, which is due to a combination of factors: the collateral damages of the global economic crisis, the increase in inequality as a consequence of globalization, and the structural wear of western democracies which, in many cases, have been incapable of updating themselves to respond to the new social and technological reality, nor of designing control tools to deal with corruption cases or political cooptation by the traditional parties.
The second key element has been the development of the network society. When we talk about the disruption caused by this new model, we often describe the role of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), the users’ new behaviour patterns, and the structural changes which are affecting all sectors of society in a cross-cutting way. But we also tend to forget another simpler, but equally important, aspect: the access to technology has been eased in such a way that the barriers to creating projects have fallen in all areas. This is the key element behind many of the citizen initiatives aimed at enlarging participation in public affairs.
This is the context in which the ideological checking applications come up. These are tools which an increasing number of countries activate at election time to help citizens know the electoral programs being proposed by the different political parties better, by placing them on an ideological axis – and this, as recent studies have shown, increases the involvement and participation of those who use them. Their operation is quite simple. Through a short and simple questionnaire on the users’ political position, they help them to find their location within the political spectrum by giving them information on this location with respect to the parties’ programs. This is why these instruments are often referred to as voting guidance apps or Voting Advice Applications (VAA).
VAAs respond perfectly to the scenario described above: they are a citizen-originated initiative, based on accessible technology, aiming at improving democratic processes. They also usually rely on social networks to get citizens to know about them, through a process which, in many cases, happens outside of traditional channels and actors, such as institutions and the mainstream media.
The idea of improving the citizens’ information before elections is actually an old aspiration. For the last fifty years, political scientists have shown that voters are not well informed before going to the polls, and that their beliefs may not be consistent with their vote. Much of the academic literature on the subject has dwelt on the limits that any normal person experiences in trying to follow all the political debates and the parties’ positions on all of the issues. The formula to alleviate this predicament is to be found in every person’s cognitive bias, which in the end turns up to be the mechanism by which we come to decide our vote.
This partly explains the success of the vote guidance apps, for they reduce the information costs of citizens facing elections. Just by answering a questionnaire, users can know which party comes closer to their own position. In addition, they get detailed information on each issue, so you that they can see where they agree and where they disagree with each party. Loaded with this information, it is much simpler and faster for ci