From Buttons to Bots: Exploring the Impact of Enhanced Features in Voting Advice Applications on Desktop PCs and Smartphones

Voters using Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) often struggle with comprehension issues, leading to satisficing behavior. Conversational Agent VAAs (CAVAAs) help users of VAAs to understand the political attitude statements further; in these tools, a chatbot (CA) has been added to which users can address comprehension questions. While early research shows various positive effects of CAVAAs , these studies have only made comparisons with a basic VAA without supplementary information and not with an enhanced VAAs (VAA+), which include clickable buttons in the web-environment . The current research, therefore, compares four VAA versions: a basic VAA, a VAA+, a CAVAA, and a CAVAA+. Two studies are reported: in the first studies participants work with one of the tools on a desktop pc; in the second study they do so on a mobile device.