No dia 12 de Março, Frederico Ferreira da Silva (ICS-ULisboa) será o orador convidado de um Seminário do Grupo de Investigação SPARC, com o tema Reducing partisan animosity with Voting Advice Applications (VAAs). A partir das 14h30, na Sala 1 do ICS-ULisboa e online.

Abstract: Given concerns about affective polarization across Western democracies, practitioners are developing interventions to reduce partisan animosity. However, these are often tested in lab conditions, with limited scalability and portability to real world scenarios. Against this backdrop, we test whether the provision of tailor-made information on issue proximity by online Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) increases users’ affect toward out-parties. In contrast to previous interventions, VAAs are easily scalable and already widely used in multi-party democracies. Based on evidence that policy disagreement largely underlies out-party hostility and that VAAs contribute to more accurate perceptions of parties’ policy stances, we demonstrate that VAAs can increase out-party affect consistently across observational and experimental data, including a field experiment with VAA users before the 2024 European parliament elections. Moreover, we shed light on the mechanisms and limitations of VAAs, whose effects are concentrated among parties that more closely converge with individuals’ policy positions. (Autores: Frederico Ferreira da Silva, Álvaro Canalejo-Molero, Lorenzo Cicchi, Diego Garzia, Andres Reiljan, Alexander H. Trechsel).

Bio: Investigador Auxiliar (Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa. Doutorado em Ciências Sociais e Políticas (2019) pelo European University Institute, Florença, Itália. Investigação em opinião pública, atitudes políticas e comportamento eleitoral.