LSE research has contributed to a wider public understanding of the European Parliament. The development of unique Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) has led to a more engaged and informed electorate, with an increase in participation in the political process.
What was the problem?
With information often kept in disparate locations, helping voters to understand the policy and political choices in European elections is difficult. It is important to have an informed electorate to enable them to make knowledgeable decisions and benefit from participation in the political process. Under-25 voters is a historically less-democratically-engaged demographic.
What did we do?
Ahead of the 2014 and 2019 European Parliament elections, research by Professor Hix was used to create several websites, launched to help citizens decide how best to use their vote. These unique Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) were developed to enable voters to understand the policy and political choices in European elections:
- Electio2014.eu (2014) and YourVoteMatters.eu (2019) were unique Voting Advice Applications, which matched users “votes” on 20 issues with the actual votes of MEPs and national and European parties.
- PollWatch2014.eu presented weekly forecasts of the seats each national and European party would win.
Electio2014.eu (now offline) was launched in April 2014 (“Electio” means “the choice” in Latin). Building on the success of Electio2014, Professor Hix teamed up with a group of democracy advocacy NGOs to expand the reach of the platform:
- VoteWatch Europe (Belgium)
- Riparte il futuro (Italy)
- European Citizen Action Service (Belgium)
- Vouliwatch (Greece)
- Collegium Civitas (Poland)
As a result, YourVoteMatters.eu was launched in September 2018 in Brussels, Athens, Warsaw, and L’Aquila (Italy). The projects were funded by competitively-won grants from the European Parliament (in 2014) and the EU Commission (in 2019).
The two websites worked in the same way:
- The research team consulted a panel of experts, put together by VoteWatch.eu, to identify the “key votes” across 20 topics in the 2009 to 2014 and 2014 to 2019 sessions of the European Parliament (such as a carbon tax, maternity leave, a trade agreement with the US, sanctions against Russia, free movement of people in the EU, regulation of banks, and so on).
- The research team carefully explained the substantive meaning of each vote and set out the arguments on each side of each vote in as neutral a way as possible.
- Using data from Hix’s research, the team identified how each individual MEP, national party, and European party voted in each of these votes.
- Users could then make their own choices about how they would vote on each issue, and how important each issue was for them.
- Having voted on the 20 issues, methods developed by Hix were usedto identify how close each user was to each individual MEP, national party, and European party – users could either look at MEPs/national parties from their own member state or from all EU countries.
Both websites were translated into all 24 official languages of the EU, to maximise their usability (thanks to a grant from the Open Society Foundation). In addition to the website, a mobile phone app was launched for Apple, Android and Windows phones, as well as a Facebook widget, which enabled a wide range of people to match their votes to politicians and parties.
Both Electio2014 and YourVoteMatters were actively promoted online by both the European Parliament and European Commission, including on the European Youth Portal, the website through which the European Union aims to provide information and opportunities for young people across the continent. The two websites received widespread coverage nationally, in European media, and beyond.
What happened?
In total, approximately 660,000 people visited the Electio2014 website or downloaded its apps, with more than 280,000 completing the vote-matching questionnaire. Five years later, more than 2.4 million people visited the YourVoteMatters website in the run-up to the 2019 European elections, with 870,000 people completing the vote-matching questionnaire. While this included good representation across the age groups, there was notable success reaching younger voters, with 45 per cent of all users being under 25. Approximately 204 million people voted in the 2019 elections, meaning YourVoteMatters reached a little over one per cent of the entire European electorate, rising to approximately three per cent of all voters under 25, promoting a sense of direct involvement and political participation and at least partly addressing the perceived democratic deficit among younger Europeans.
PollWatch2014 (now offline) was launched in April 2014, as part of the Electio2014 platform. PollWatch2014 presented weekly forecasts of the vote-shares and likely seats won for each national party in all 28 member states, as well as for the European political groups as a whole. The link to Electio2014 also allowed citizens to connect their “closeness” to each candidate and political party (from Electio2014) to the likelihood that each candidate or party would win a seat (from PollWatch2014). This enabled each person who used these websites to gain crucial information for helping them decide how best to use their vote.
The forecasts presented on PollWatch2014 were the outputs of the predictive model developed by Simon Hix and Michael Marsh from the papers: “Second-order effects plus pan-European political swings: an analysis of European parliament elections across time” and “Punishment or protest? Understanding European Parliament elections”.
The forecasts were updated with national polling data for the duration of the election campaign. Indeed, these forecasts soon became an authoritative source of polling data throughout Europe, informing reporting and being cited extensively across continental media. PollWatch2014 data underpinned election campaign reporting in more than 175 news stories across 20 EU countries in April and May 2014, including in The Guardian, Le Monde and Die Welt. Thirteen countries outside of the EU - including the USA, China, Switzerland and Norway - also drew on PollWatch data to keep their readers abreast of European parties' changing electoral prospects, with coverage in international outlets such as Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg.
The relative authoritativeness of the model was subsequently underscored as it correctly predicted 726 of the 751 seats won by the European political groups in the election (a 97 per cent success rate), and correctly predicted 669 of the seats won by each national party (an 89 per cent success rate). As such, PollWatch2014 outperformed most of the other European election forecasts in 2014, mainly because these other forecasts were based purely on polling data, rather than a predictive model.
Ultimately the Voting Advice Applications have contributed to a wider public understanding of the European Parliament and the choices presented in its elections. The electorate’s ability to make informed decisions has been improved by engagement with the VAAs, benefitting participation in the political process.