Criteria to Evaluate Voting Indicators and a Recipe for a New One

This paper is made up of two interrelated parts. The first part contains a critical evaluation of so called Voting Indicators, online internet applications that help and advise voters which political party to choose at parliamentary elections. Applying validity tests and checking the discriminatory power, it is argued that the Dutch StemWijzer 2002 is seriously flawed. The second part is devoted to designing voting indicators in an economically efficient way by making them interactive: the propositions to be evaluated by the voter depend on the responses to propositions at an earlier stage. The viability of such an indicator hinges on the possibility to determine the partisanship leaning (leftist or rightist) of voters by means of a limited number of questions. Also a simple model is presented which can be used as a benchmark to assess the quality of voting indicators, where quality is simply defined as the fraction of correct voting advises. This paper is pioneering in the sense that it is the first time that serious attention is paid to voting indicators in general, to the criteria they should ideally meet and to the possibility to make them interactive.