Handbook for an Educational Voting Advice Application

What?

You are looking at the Handbook for an Educational Voting Advice Application (VAA). Its purpose is to help you understand how a modern VAA can support citizens’ ability to comprehend politics and lower the threshold for voting.

While voting advice applications have always aimed to promote these goals, recent research has deepened our understanding of the needs of different user groups. At the same time, technological development has opened new opportunities for creating more educational VAAs. For instance, the ethical and considered use of artificial intelligence within a voting advice application can enhance users’ understanding of politics.

This handbook brings together the key principles that should guide the design and implementation of an educational VAA. You will also find practical examples of voting advice applications that have been implemented in accordance with these principles. The example VAAs have been published as part of Sitra’s work (2023–2025) to develop a modular, open‑source VAA platform in Finland. The open platform speeds up the publication of VAAs, reduces publishing costs, and provides flexible technical conditions for new VAA innovations, including the development of increasingly educational VAAs.

The guide also includes anonymous quotations collected from the VAA forum that convened regularly in 2023–2025. The forum brought together VAA experts in Finland to share knowledge and deepen collective understanding of VAA design, implementation and development.

For whom?

The Handbook for an Educational Voting Advice Application provides practical guidance for VAA publishers and developers, as well as for organisations considering the publication of their own VAA in the future. It also provides valuable insights for anyone who is more generally interested in how modern VAAs can support citizens’ understanding of party politics and key societal issues.

Why?

VAAs are widely used in certain European countries. In Finland, for example, the user base has doubled and diversified during the 2000s.

It is therefore surprising how little voting advice applications have evolved over their history, even though the need for political understanding and fact‑based information is greater than ever in democratic societies. Today, a significant portion of people follow political events primarily through social media, where trust in societal institutions is increasingly polarised. As a result, political discourse has become sharper and more confrontational.

As public debate becomes more polarised, it is critical to ensure that people have access to well‑grounded, accurate information on current political themes. An educational VAA responds to this need. It strengthens users’ understanding of politics and societal issues in a way that is engaging and tailored to their needs.