Online Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are digital tools that prepare the most important campaign topics for voters. They thus fulfil important democratic functions by ensuring transparency and encouraging voters to vote, thus increasing voter participation and the democratic legitimacy of elections. We, at our chair, have already developed numerous electoral aids for the: Bundestag (federal elections), Landtag (State elections), European and local elections.
In online electoral aids, users state their position on the most important election campaign topics, which are formulated as theses. As a rule, online electoral aids comprise 20-40 theses. Users are provided with scales for approval or rejection. Subsequently, an individual political agreement with the parties or candidates is calculated on this basis.
The Election-Compass is a scientific Voting Advice Application (VAA), which is beeing developed in a cooperaion of Prof. Dr. Norbert Kersting and Jan Philipp Thomeczek from the University of Münster and Kieskompas from the Netherlands. Kieskompas started specializung in 2006 in the development of online Voting Advice Aplications and has already been responsible for projects in more than 40 different countries. In Germany projects on the municipal, regional and european level have been developed under the name "Wahl-Kompass".
Currently the Wahl-Kompass is available for the municipal election in Frankfurt (2021). You can find the Wahl-Kompass here!
Previous Wahl-Kompass editions included:
Have a look at the report from Sat.1
Federal Election in Germany 2013/2017/2021
European Election2009/2014/2019
Regional Elecion Lower Saxony (2017/2022) and Hesse (2018) as well as North Rhine-Westphalia (2022)
Municipal Election in Frankfurt (Election of The Lord Major 2018 and 2021)
Parlament election Ruhr (2020)
In total the Election-Compass offers more functions, more transparency and more flexibiliy than other voting advice applications. The Election-Compass starts with the party positioning. Partys have to send us their positions in accordance to concrete text evidence, for instance the party manifesto. In the mean time we carry out a scientific positioning of the party with the help of schooled experts. The results of these two procedures are beeing compared and eventuell discrepancies are beeing discussed with the parties. Transparency is our highest value: Without reason no position! Our second caracteristic is the positioning of the users answers to the statements in the political landscape. The coordinates can also be calculated for specific fields seperately for example for the themes environmental protection, economic and social policy.
You are welcome to e-mail us to: wahlkompass@uni-muenster.de
Unter folgendem Link finden Sie Auswertungen und Analysen aus dem Wahl-Kompass zur Bundestagswahl 2021 unseres Lehrstuhls:
In 2021 the 'Kommunalwahlcheck' was used in Wetzlar, Hessen. Also, the projects 'Hannowahlcheck' and voting advice applications for the municipal elections in the Emsland region were supervised with the 'Stadtjugendringe'.
The 'Kommunalwahlcheck' will be used for the first time for the local elections 2020 in NRW. It is intended as a low-threshold offer to motivate voters to vote. The municipal election check contains the 30 most important election campaign topics, which are formulated as theses. The parties or candidates for the Lord Mayor have received these theses in advance and have been given the opportunity to position themselves and justify their positions. The local election check will be available in Münster, Essen, Bielefeld, Cologne and Siegen. Here you can access the former page of the 'Kommunalwahlcheck' in NRW 2020.
