Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are online survey tools that inform voters about political parties and their standpoints. Recent research shows that these tools may be improved by integrating a chatbot function that can provide on demand background information about the political issues. This new goal-oriented tool for information-seeking tasks is called a Conversational Agent Voting Advice Application (CAVAA). In an experimental study (N = 185) during the Dutch national elections of 17 March 2021, three CAVAA designs (structured with buttons, non-structured with a text field, and semi-structured that contained both response options) have been compared on tool evaluation measures (ease of use, usefulness, and playfulness), and political measures (perceived political knowledge and voting intention). Also, a comparison has been made between users with a high or a low educational level. Results show a structured design was perceived as more playful compared to a non-structured design. What is more, the structured as well as semi-structured design were easier to use by lower educated users than the non-structured design. Lastly, this lower educated group also reported higher levels of political knowledge after using a CAVAA than the higher educated users. This suggests that CAVAAs can be a valuable tool to inform voters.

The file 'Datafile_experiment_Dataverse.sav' contains the experimental data. We have included all stimulus materials in a pdf file. Moreover, we have uploaded an mp4-clip showing how working with the CAVAA worked. Additional documentation and metadata can be found in the file 'Data Report CAVAA.pdf'