e thoroughly. As a result, analyses of specific cases are increasingly common – Switzerland, Turkey, Belgium, Hungary or the 2014 European elections -, asa are research projects that go into a detailed analysis of user behaviour as he or she browses, or of privacy control during the process.
As we have seen, it seems that vote guidance apps are opening up a new information channel which improves political participation in many respects. The system, however, is not free from criticism. Some authors point out that to call them "vote guiders" implies that the decision to vote can only be taken on the basis of the parties’ political positions. This would of course be a reductionist view since, by considering all parties to be on an equal footing, they do not take into account the real options that each party actually has to come to power and turn its proposals into laws of the land. All parties are labeled in the same way, regardless of their size, leadership, territorial location, government experience, or the possibility of coalitions.
We can address this problem in two ways. A first option would be to incorporate all these factors into the algorithms, so that the system would not only assess the coincidence between political positions, but offer also specific information about each party. This would not be a perfect solution, for it would be obviously biased, but the results would certainly be more realistic. The second option would be to change the narrative about these applications, explaining their purpose – information - and their limitations very clearly, so that people would not expect from them anything but context and complementary information.
In any case, this problem has surfaced due to the widespread use of these apps and their increasing importance in the electoral processes. The VAAs have moved from anecdote to consolidation in the last 10 years and have become a source of information for an increasing number of voters, a driver for electoral participation, and a supplier of quality data on the electoral behaviour of citizens. It is not unreasonable to think that their role will tend to grow thanks to the improvement and specialization of the formats, and the general access to networks by all layers of society. From the results that have been observed so far, both in terms of participation and use, it is desirable that this should happen - the sooner, the better.
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