I Need a CAVAA: How Conversational Agent Voting Advice Applications (CAVAAs) Affect Users' Political Knowledge and Tool Experience.

In election times, millions of voters consult Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) to learn more about political parties and their standpoints. While VAAs have been shown to enhance political knowledge and increase electoral turnout, research also demonstrates that voters frequently experience comprehension problems when responding to the political attitude statements in a VAA. We describe two studies in which we test a new type of VAA, called Conversational Agent VAA (CAVAA), in which users can easily access relevant information about the political issues in the VAA statements by asking questions to a chatbot.

The affect of negativity: testing the Foreign Language Effect in three types of valence framing and a moral dilemma.

In decision-making people react differently to positive wordings than to negatives, which may be caused by negativity bias: a difference in emotional force of these wordings. Because emotions are assumed to be activated more strongly in one's mother tongue, we predict a Foreign Language Effect, being that such framing effects are larger in a native language than in a foreign one. In two experimental studies ( = 475 and  = 503) we tested this prediction for balanced and unbalanced second language users of Spanish and English and for three types of valence framing effects.

A good tennis player does not lose matches. The effects of valence congruency in processing stance-argument pairs.

According to the principle of Argumentative Orientation (AO), speakers and writers adjust their frame choice to the opinion they want to convey and hearers and readers are sensitive to this profile choice. In three reaction time studies (N = 68; N = 97; N = 60) we investigated whether, in line with AO, stance-argument pairs congruent in valence are easier to process and to verify than incongruent pairs. Second, we tested whether, in line with predictions from the Markedness Principle (MP), positive congruent pairs are easier to process than negative congruent pairs.

Issue framing in online voting advice applications: The effect of left-wing and right-wing headers on reported attitudes.

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) provide voting recommendations to millions of people. As these voting recommendations are based on users' answers to attitude questions, the framing of these questions can have far-reaching consequences. The current study reports on a field experiment in which the framing of the header above VAA statements (N = 17) was manipulated (condition 1: no header; condition 2: a right-wing header, e.

Positive vs. Negative: The Impact of Question Polarity in Voting Advice Applications.

Online Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are survey-like instruments that help citizens to shape their political preferences and compare them with those of political parties. Especially in multi-party democracies, their increasing popularity indicates that VAAs play an important role in opinion formation for citizens, as well as in the public debate prior to elections. Hence, the objectivity and transparency of VAAs are crucial.