Patching Democracy – a short introduction to Voting Advice Applications, by Till Sanders @ #rc3
Channel: Till Sanders
Date: 2020-12-28

This talk was originally held at the Chaos Communication Congress / Remote Chaos Experience of 2020.

We introduce the concept of a VAA by example of the well-known "Wahl-O-Mat", talk about the benefits and move on to explain, how to run an election compass for your hometown using the free and open source OpenElectionCompass.

A voting advice application is a great way to support elections and democracy as a whole by making the parties or candidates more transparent and comparable. The differences between political parties are often difficult to understand for the voters, especially for first-time voters. To make elections more accessible some countries have started to offer election compasses, or VAAs. Services like these help citizens getting to know the parties or candidates by presenting a carefully chosen collection of political statements. The users and the parties both take position to these statements. Based on this, voters can quickly get a comparison between their own opinions and the positions of the parties. In Germany, this service is implemented by the bpb, the Federal Agency for Civic Education and is called "Wahl-O-Mat". In the Netherlands this concept is called "Kieskompas". Software like this has developed in the early 2000s and evolved ever since. Running such a project offers great value to citizens, the political system and our democracy. It is also very expensive. Implementing an election compass is not only time consuming, but also requires great technical knowledge. Usually, there is no election compass for smaller elections, because hiring software developers is simply out of budget. OpenElectionCompass offers a free alternative – free as in free speech as well as in free beer. The requirements for a voting advice application are very similar, be it for a small or a national election, for an election in Berlin or an election in Brussels. OpenElectionCompass aims to provide a free solution, simple to configure, customize and deploy. By continuously improving our project, we have an advantage over agencies doing this only every few years. And by not developing behind closed doors, we are transparent and open for everyone. This talk will give an introduction to the concept of VAAs by different examples. It will deliver background knowledge about matching algorithms and provide hands-on guidelines on how to run your own election compass using the OpenElectionCompass. How to get started, build a team, develop statements, address parties, configure and deploy the OpenElectionCompass, attract attention and so on.

00:00 Patching Democracy
02:46 Contents
03:11 The Story So Far
06:53 Voting Advice Applications
12:00 Algorithm War
14:30 City-Block-Algorithm
15:35 Scalar-Algorithm
16:23 Hybrid-Algorithm
16:59 Comparison of Algorithms
17:46 OpenElectionCompass
21:35 The Configuration Editor
23:06 Features
26:06 Do It Yourself
31:18 Phase 1 – Preparing
32:15 Phase 2 – Your Team
33:43 Phase 3 – The Parties
34:35 Phase 4 – Preparing The Workshop
36:40 Phase 5 – The Theses
41:06 Phase 6 – The Positions
42:19 Phase 7 – Evaluating The Answers
43:05 Phase 8 – Time For A Test
43:32 Phase 9 – Going Public
43:49 Phase 10 – Observe
44:41 Closing thought

Quellen:

BPB. „Die Nutzer des Wahl-O-Mat.“ Accessed December 28, 2020. https://www.bpb.de/politik/wahlen/wahl-o-mat/177430/die-nutzer-des-wahl-o-mat

Decker, Frank, Volker Best, Sandra Fischer and Anna Küppers. „Vertrauen in Demokratie.“ Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 2018-2020. https://www.fes.de/studie-vertrauen-in-demokratie.

ECPR Research Network. „VAA History.“ Voting Advice Applications. Accessed December 28, 2020. http://vaa-research.net/?page_id=80.

Garzia, Diego, Alexander H. Trechsel and Andrea De Angelis. „Voting
Advice Applications and Electoral Participation: A Multi-Method Study.“ Political Communication 34, No. 3 (February 2017): 424-443. DOI: 10.1080/10584609.2016.1267053.

Garzia, Diego, and Stefan Marschall. „Voting Advice Applications.“ Oxford Research Encyclopedias: 
Politics, March 26, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.620.

Mendez, Fernando. „Matching voters with political parties and candidates: an empirical test of four algorithms.“ Int. J. Electronic Governance 5, Nos. 3/4 (2012): 264–278.

Rölle, Daniel. „NICHTS GENAUES WEISS MAN NICHT!? Über die Perzeption von Wahlprogrammen in der Öffentlichkeit.“ Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 54 No. 2 (2002): 264-80.

Schulze, Martin. „Effects of Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) on Political Knowledge About Party Positions.“ Policy & Internet 6, No. 1 (2014): 46-68.

Van Camp, Kirsten, Jonas Lefevere and Stefaan Walgrave. „The Content and Formulation of Statements in Voting Advice Applications: A Comparative Analysis of 26 VAAs.“ Matching Voters with parties and candidates: voting advice applications in comparative perspective. Corchester: ECPR Press, 2014.