Kristjan Vassil

A bottleneck model of e-voting: Why technology fails to boost turnout:

Recent years have seen increasing interest in internet voting in theory and practice. Proponents hope that modernizing the electoral process will boost turnout. Less optimistic scholars object that the new technology merely perpetuates existing patterns of participation. This study aims to arbitrate the controversy. New survey data from the 2007 general election in Estonia allow us to predict the usage of e-voting and its impact on electoral participation. We find that e-voting mostly affects ‘peripheral’ citizens (in a demographic and political sense), but only few of these citizens vote online in the first place. Conversely, the impact on typical e-voters is low. This ‘bottleneck’ effect explains why e-voting has failed to boost turnout but also points to a role in reducing political inequality.

Voting Advice Applications: How Useful and for Whom?

The use of voting advice applications (VAAs) has increased steadily in recent years. VAAs have been developed for elections taking place in individual countries as well as for region-wide European Union elections. In this article, we study the determinants of the perceived usefulness of VAAs for their users, with data from the EU Profiler—a voting advice application developed by the European Union Democracy Observatory (EUDO) that was first applied to the 2009 European Parliamentary elections. We use a multilevel latent variable approach that allows us to study underlying evaluations based on ratings of multiple features of the EU Profiler, taking into account country-level heterogeneity in evaluations of the system. The results of this study improve our understanding of the benefits of VAAs for different segments of the population, and should be of interest to scholars and policy-makers who are interested in improving the experience of individuals who use VAAs to inform their voting decisions.

Indirect Campaigning: Past, Present and Future of Voting Advice Applications

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) have become an integral part of many electoral campaigns in modern democracies. VAAs allow users to compare, on the Internet, their political preferences with the positions of parties and candidates prior to an election. In recent elections in Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Germany, more than a quarter of the respective electorates used such an online- tool. This contribution explains the logic behind VAAs, retraces their historical development and diffusion, discusses the most recent findings on the impact such tools can have on political behavior of citizens, as well as on political parties themselves, and finally offers a look into the future of online voting advice applications.

More Choice, Higher Turnout? The Impact of Consideration Set Size and Homogeneity on Political Participation

Abstract Central to the emerging scholarship on how political supply influences electoral behavior is the claim that more choice leads to higher turnout. However, empirical tests of this proposition have been limited to the aggregate level. This article examines the relationship between the properties of electoral choice sets, as perceived by the voters, and electoral participation. Following recent advances in choice research, the article distinguishes between an awareness set, consisting of all choice options known to the voter, and a consideration set which includes only those alternatives that are seriously considered by the voter. We hypothesize that the cardinality, ideological homogeneity and distinctiveness of individual consideration sets are positively associated with electoral participation. The expectation is tested with individual-level data from three waves of the European Elections Study. Our results suggest that the relationship between the structure of political supply and participation is complex: while the number of choice alternatives in the consideration set is positively associated with turnout, the ideological diversity of choice options suppresses electoral participation.

Indifference or Indignation? Explaining Purposive Vote Spoiling in Elections

Abstract This article examines self-reported purposively spoiled votes using individual-level survey data from European Parliament election studies, 1989–2009. Three rival explanations, one centering on low political interest and compulsory voting, another on anti-party protest behavior and a further on anti-EU attitudes are evaluated to explain the puzzling behavior of turning out for elections while purposefully casting a spoiled vote. The results presented in this article give support to the second proposition. A perceived lack of party choices among the voting options and non-partisanship among voters otherwise satisfied with the democratic process seems responsible for, at first sight, the irrational choice of ballot spoiling. This behavior is best described as a mild form of anti-party protest voting.

Does Internet voting make elections less social? Group voting patterns in Estonian e-voting log files (2013–2015)

Remote Internet voting places the control and secrecy of the immediate voting environment on the shoulder of the individual voter but it also turns voting into yet another on-line activity thus endangering the well-known social nature of voting and possibly reducing the crucial sense of civic duty that is important for a healthy democracy. There is however a complete lack of evidence to what degree this actually materializes once electronic voting is introduced. This paper uses individual level log data on Internet voting in Estonian elections between 2013–2015 to inspect if Internet voting retains the social nature of the voting act. We do so by examining if Internet voting in groups takes place and what implications it has for voting speed. We find strong evidence of e-voting in pairs. Same aged male-female pairs seem to be voting in close proximity to each other, consistent with spouses or partners voting together. Also, female-female and female-male pairs with large age differences seem to be voting together, consistent with a parent voting with an adult aged offspring. With regards to voting speed we see the second vote in a vote pair being considerably faster than the first vote, again indicating a shared voting act. We end with a discussion of how the onset of electronic voting does not make elections less social, but does make vote secrecy more a choice rather than a requirement.