@article{2014:westle:the_wah,
title = {The “Wahl-O-Mat” in the course of the German Federal Election 2013 – Effects of a German VAA on users’ election-relevant political knowledge},
year = {2014},
note = {Ideally, voters should be fully informed about party positions on
important political issues and vote for the political party, which
suits their own interests and ideas best. Yet, in general, political
knowledge is quite low among the public. Moreover it is distributed
unequally among social segments. Therefore the legitimacy of
representative democracy is challenged. The German “Wahl-O-Mat”
aims at informing the electorate on party positions and at fostering
“correct voting”. During the campaign for the Bundestag election
2013 the “Wahl-O-Mat” was used more than 10 million times.In this
article we ask in how far the “Wahl-O-Mat” contributes to
voters’ political knowledge on parties’ positions on selected
political issues. Our analysis is based on an online pre-experimental
design conducted two weeks before the election. The main results show
that using the “Wahl-O-Mat” increases knowledge on party
positions, but only to a small degree. Besides improvements of
information levels, the number of “don’t know”-answers also
rises. The degree to which individuals are able to learn depends
strongly on pre-existing knowledge levels. The latter in turn are
determined by motivation and resources.},
journal = {ZPol Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft},
pages = {389--426},
author = {Westle, Bettina and Begemann, Christian and Rütter, Astrid},
volume = {24},
number = {4}
}