Election Compass (Kieskompas) Voter Advice Applications are independent and objective web applications that allow voters to match their own political opinions on crucial electoral issues with the official positions of the major political parties. Kieskompas VAA’s do this by soliciting answers to approximately 30 questions on major political issues, then calculating a personalised outcome in the form of a graphical representation of the voter’s position in the political landscape. Parties are also positioned in the Kieskompas landscape, which allows each user to analyse their distance or proximity to each of the parties. The issue positions of political parties’ are extracted from party manifestos and other official documentation through a rigorous academic process developed by Kieskompas and conducted by an independent and well respected academic team of national politics experts.

Election Compass (Kieskompas) has developed a unique debate that is active and visual. Participants enter the debate floor, and ‘physically’ take position on a certain issue and embrace the opportunity to actually talk to each other about it.
The debate floor is created with five colorful Kieskompas mats, that divide the floor in to five answer categories. The main objective of the Kieskompas debate game is to create a platform for an open dialogue and an exchange of views between participants on important and sometimes controversial issues. Each participant is stimulated to provide arguments why she or he adopts a certain position on an issue. Through the exchange of standpoints and arguments, the Kieskompas game aims to foster a tolerant and constructive discussion.

Kieskompas VAAs not only help millions of people to select the party that is closest to their own preferences, it also enables our team of academics to shed new light on public opinion, voting behaviour, campaign dynamics, party cohesion, and political participation.
Kieskompas VAAs collect important and scientifically relevant data on party positions on salient issues and generate several very useful and valuable databases: Party position data, coder reliability data, user data, media data, network data, and a large corpus of Tweets/Facebook data.
Kieskompas develops academic research based on these comprehensive sources that can be used to analyse citizens’ political behaviour. All data is always generated with accordance to national and EU data protection laws and is subsequently deposited to social science archives in order to be made freely available to the scholarly community.

Kieskompas academic research can be done upon request and is totally customized to the editorial needs of our media partners. At Kieskompas we are pro-active in analysing voter patterns that we find in the data. Kieskompas produces unique content for media partners, based on our information on issue positions of parties and the political preferences of the users, including the match between the two.
We can basically deliver custom made analyses and our team is available to provide the information, analyses, commentary and fact-checking that our media partners need for high quality reporting on the elections.