1 Voting Advice Applications in Japan An Overview Takayoshi UEKAMI Kochi University Hidenori TSUTSUMI Kagawa University 2014/09/30 Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Takayoshi UEKAMI, Kochi University. Contact: uekamit@kochi-u.ac.jp Abstract In this paper, we aim to outline the characteristics and history of voting advice applications ("VAAs") in Japan and discuss future issues surrounding VAAs. In the typical VAA, users view the questions on policies and respond with either 'Agree' or 'Disagree'. Since the parties' or candidates’ responses are already known, the users’ responses are matched to those patterns, and the degree of compatibility is calculated from the number of matching answers. For example, Japanese Votematch poses questions on 20 to 25 issues. The issues that are mentioned the most are selected by quantitatively analyzing each party's manifesto and other policy documents. In addition, the manifestos are analyzed and the parties are surveyed in order to narrow down the issues into those ones on which the parties take different stands. This means the application uses salient and positional issues. From 2003 onwards, Japan's political parties touted their manifestos in the national elections, attracting the attention of a large number of voters. Voters were encouraged to use the parties' policy platforms to help them decide who to vote for, and VAAs began to gain popularity. The first reported use of VAAs was in the 2001 HC election, but this was limited to Tokyo Prefecture. The first nationwide deployment was in the 2007 HC election. After that, Japan's major newspapers and media outlets began offering VAAs, which received media coverage each time there was a national election, and it became commonplace for voters to broadcast their results via social networking sites. But there are several restrictions of VAAs in Japan. For instance, the primary users for online tools such as VAAs are thought to be young people, but the younger generation displays little interest in politics. The lowest voter turnout in 2009 HR elections is the group aged 20 to 24, while the highest is the group aged 65 to 69, and the difference between the