My colleague Alexander Trechsel at the European University University and the European Union Democracy Observatory has just launched a new Voting Advice Application (VAA) for the 2014 European Parliament Elections, euandi.eu. If you are in a nation participating in these elections, check out euandi!

VAAs have proliferated in recent years, especially in European elections. They are widely used by voters, and increasingly used by researchers to study political communications, the use of new technologies in politics, voting behavior and electoral politics. For example, I recently published a paper with Ines Levin, Alexander Trechsel and Kristjan Vassil in the Journal of Information Technology and Politics, “Voting Advice Applications: How Useful and for Whom?”. We have another paper on VAAs, in Party Politics, “Party preferences in the digital age: The impact of voting advice applictions”, (work that we did with the late Peter Mair).

There’s a lot of excellent work new work on VAAs that has been published, or is now forthcoming. For example, Diego Garzia and Stefan Marschall have an edited volume forthcoming from ECPR Press, “Matching Voters with Parties and Candidates.” There’s much, much more; VAAs are proliferating and many researchers are studying both their use and the data they yield in their work.