New paper in Politics and Governance!
Estimating the Recommendation Certainty in Candidate-based Voting Advice Applications
Our new paper "Estimating the Recommendation Certainty in Candidate-based Voting Advice Applications" is now published in Politics and Governance as part of the special issue on "Voting Advice Applications: Methodological Innovations, Behavioural Effects, and Research Perspectives"
Imagine you answer political questions in a voting advice application (e.g., Wahl-O-Mat or Smartvote). When have you answered enough questions to get reliable advice? How do you balance the invested time against the value of additional information?
In this paper, we develop a statistical model that estimates the certainty of candidate recommendations throughout the survey process. We complement this with a user experiment in which participants see a preview of highly probable candidates while answering questions. We find that this preview increases users’ willingness to continue answering questions, leading to more accurate recommendations.
Many thanks to Fynn Bachmann, Daan van der Weijden, Cristina Sarasua and Abraham Bernstein! The paper can be found here