Duration: March 2017 until July 2017

Funding: Landeszentrale für politische Bildung NRW

Wahl-O-Mat Research has obtained third-party funding from the Landeszentrale für politische Bildung NRW to analyse the state elections in North Rhine-Westphalia in 2017. A research project is being carried out for the NRW State Agency for Civic Education that is divided into two thematic modules.

In the first research module, the focus is on (follow-up) communication on the Wahl-O-Mat in social media. Social media mining will be used to record posts on Twitter that are shared about the Wahl-O-Mat. In this way, the resonance of the tool, the framing of the tool and the type of posts will be determined. This analysis is particularly relevant against the background of the tool's creators' intention to stimulate political follow-up communication.

The second research module is about the analogue Wahl-O-Mat, the so-called stick-on Wahl-O-Mat. This non-digital version of the tool makes the positioning of other users on the theses visible, which can have effects on the users in the sense of the opinion leader concept. In addition, there are interactions between the users, which could also have an effect on the positioning. In the context of this module, a quantitative survey will be conducted following the use of the tool. The quantitative survey will be complemented by qualitative interviews and the method "thinking aloud", so that several methods can be applied within the framework of this module. The aim of this module is to learn more about the users of the analogue Wahl-O-Mat, both quantitatively and qualitatively, and also to compare these results with the results on the digital Wahl-O-Mat.

Overall, this research project aims to look at and analyse new phenomena in the field of online voting aids.