Uyttendaele, Laura
[UCL]
The Test électoral éducatif is a Voting Advice Application (VAA) that provides citizens with personalized information about their ideological profile by comparing their positions on a selection of political issues with those of political parties. While several scholars agree that VAAs are interactive tools to assist young people in familiarizing themselves with political issues and ideological positions and can be used as a teaching resource for citizenship education, field research examining the effects of VAAs on young people particularly is lacking. This study therefore aims to answer the following research question: To what extent does the use of a VAA in the classroom impact pre-voting citizens' sense of political trust? This research draws primarily on research in political socialization, education, and political science. In order to isolate the effect of the use of a VAA from other variables in a natural classroom setting, we set up an original and replicable experimental design. The experiment takes place in natural classroom or computer room settings with 5th and 6th year secondary pupils in schools all across Wallonia (Belgium). Data collection was carried out in three waves, from January 20th to April 3rd 2020. Our experimental study allows to disentangle three kinds of VAA effects: the statement effect — the effect resulting from the simple exposure to VAA statements; the advice effect — the effect resulting from receiving voting advice related to the VAA use; and the match effect — the effect resulting from the matching of the advice with the user’s prior party preferences (incongruent, congruent, or activating advice). The results of comprehensive analyses show that VAA use in the classroom builds up pupils’ political trust.
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Bibliographic reference |
Uyttendaele, Laura. The effects of Voting Advice Application s on pre voters’ sense of political trust.8th annual conference on Citizenship Education (Brussels, du 08/06/2023 au 09/06/2023). |
Permanent URL |
http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/288266 |