Voting Advice Applications in Lithuania: Promoting Programmatic Competition or Breeding Populism?

Abstract

AbstractThis article analyses the effects of the voting assistance tool Manobalsas that was developed for the Lithuanian parliamentary elections of 2008 by three leading universities in Lithuania. Analytical voting assistance tools (or Voting Advice Applications — VAAs) assist voters by offering systematised information about candidates and parties, and by providing voting recommendation based on the congruence of political attitudes between a voter and a party. Voting assistance tools were mainly developed by academic institutions to inform voters about the policy positions of political parties, and to promote programmatic competition between parties. The analysis of the use of the Manobalsas voting advice application in Lithuania suggests that parties might be able to manipulate the results of the tool by adopting non‐ideological (ideologically unconstrained) populist policy positions. The remarkable success of a non‐programmatic party in the Lithuanian Manobalsas system demonstrates that VAAs might be advantageous to non‐ideological populist parties which are most flexible to adjust to the attitudes of an “average” voter.