Axiomatic analysis of voting advice applications

Characterize which social-choice axioms and formal guarantees can be satisfied by voting advice applications that elicit voter and candidate positions through policy questionnaires and aggregate those responses into candidate or party recommendations.

Background

Voting advice applications recommend candidates or parties by eliciting voter and candidate responses to policy questionnaires and computing similarities between them. The paper notes that these systems involve multiple design stages, including adaptive question selection, the choice of metrics and weights, and the selection of political dimensions represented in the questionnaire.

Because the entire pipeline functions as an elicitation and aggregation mechanism, it can be studied using the axiomatic tools of social choice theory. The unresolved issue is to determine which desirable axioms or guarantees can apply to these systems, particularly in light of their susceptibility to manipulation and the sensitivity of recommendations to design choices.

References

Since a voting advice application is itself an elicitation and aggregation mechanism, it naturally lends itself to social choice-style axiomatic analysis, raising many open questions for future work.

— The New Mathematics of Democracy  (2608.16869 - Flanigan et al., 17 Aug 2026) in Section 2, subsection “Frontier work and open questions,” paragraph “Voting advice applications”