Program (14th September 2026)

Towards Constructive Disagreement - Rethinking what Voting Advice Applications Simplify

What competencies do citizens actually need to sustain a healthy democracy?
One day every four or five years, citizens go to the polls. On every other day, they try to live their lives in a political environment that is becoming increasingly hostile. Yet voting advice applications (VAAs), the most widely used tools of digital political education, are predominantly designed as matching systems for this one day: they reduce the complex decision of whom to vote for to a fixed set of questions and return a match percentage.

We propose a new direction for political education tools, one that treats the navigation of interpersonal disagreement as a core competency for a functioning democracy. Building on wahl.chat, our open-source system used by more than 250,000 people across the 2025 federal election and the 2026 state elections, we are developing a personalised educational platform that makes vast amounts of public data accessible and structures the interaction into bite-sized, gamified lessons. Rather than telling citizens whom to vote for, it trains them to articulate their own position, engage with opposing views constructively.