ยป Who Should You Vote For
Zeb recently pointed me to the CBC’s Vote Compass app. You may have filled out a socialist/capitalist-libertarian/authoritarian test that’s popular online, but instead of asking you generic political questions, this one asks you about controversial issues in Canada. This results in a different centre of gravity than the international Political Compass test.
It’s quite a sophisticated application, with the ability to remove but not weight areas of concern and compare your answer with parties’ positions on an issue-by-issue basis. They missed an opportunity by not having the Share on Facebook option publish your score. In fact, given that it’s a Flash app, there’s no way to link to your score and the saving feature doesn’t seem to work.
The way it was produced sounds surprisingly rigorous and the political parties were given an opportunity to dispute the calibration. Relevant quotes and links to party documents are provided for each question. The questions about who you think would be the best Prime Minister seem kind of useless, but I’m assuming CBC is going to publish statistics from the app throughout the election.
The left-wing blogosphere has decided it’s rigged in some way or another, but I’m satisfied that it’s good enough. When anybody asks me for advice on who to vote for, this is where I’ll send them if I don’t know how to vote strategically in their particular district.
Looks like they’ve added the Facebook share button…
Ryley
29 Mar 11 at 8:50 am
FIFY:
Who You Should Vote For
s.
29 Mar 11 at 9:22 am
Sliiiiightly more seriously: the whiners are Rabble are right about the double-barrelled questions, if nothing else.
s.
29 Mar 11 at 9:24 am
Even more seriously: we vote for representatives, not parties, and according to our friends at How’d They Vote, just under half of all MPs broke with the party line at least once in the last session, and some did up to twelve or sixteen times. So you should go to an all candidates meeting, see what the candidates are like, and, if you get the chance, ask them what it would take for them to break with the party line.
s.
29 Mar 11 at 9:32 am
@Ryley: I believe the share button just links to the quiz, it doesn’t share what score you personally got. Although I didn’t actually try it, I just examined what it was doing…
Jared
29 Mar 11 at 9:56 am
@s.: That’s a lovely romantic idea. But statistically, almost all voters make almost all of their choice based on party and party leader. This tool will help them make that choice better.
If you’re the kind of voter who is willing to go to an all-candidates meeting, then you already know enough about the parties that this tool won’t tell you anything new. Whereas many non-voters, especially young non-voters, claim that they don’t know enough about the platforms to vote. (Whether they’re full of shit is a topic for another post.)
Jared
29 Mar 11 at 9:58 am
When I first saw this I thought: “wow, what a terrible idea for an app.”
The data retention policy alone would be enough to give a third party organization philosophical-political nightmares, let alone an actual governmental body. Is it even legal for them to ask the electorate how they’re voting?
I’m kinda glad to hear the “save” feature doesn’t work… That means they’re not linking this data back to individual people — yet.
Jack
29 Mar 11 at 5:06 pm
And, just to be an English bitch, the post’s title “should”* be: “For Whom You Should Vote”.
* English is a language of usage though, so whateva — Ye Olde Queene’s English is clunktastic.
Jack
29 Mar 11 at 5:11 pm
I agree; this app is better than I expected. It could be useful to uninformed (potential) voters who want to put in a minimal amount of effort to decide for whom they should vote. Although I would prefer that people like that just choose not to vote (or, ideally, of course, actually become motivated and informed).
I was perplexed by a few questions, such as asking if we should have a closer economic relationship with the US. With free trade, how could our economic relationship be closer without a common labour market or currency, which are non-starters? So what party is in favour of that position? And the question about making it easier to get an abortion – are there mainstream parties saying that free procedures and no criminal limits isn’t easy enough? Or is the question just an indirect way of asking if you are in favour of restricting abortion access?
@Jack The quiz doesn’t directly ask for whom (or for which party) you will vote in this election.
Don
29 Mar 11 at 5:33 pm
@Jack: Correction: After taking the quiz itself and viewing the results, CBC asks you for whom you’d vote and some other demographic information.
Don
29 Mar 11 at 5:36 pm
I think I substantially agree with this.
s.
30 Mar 11 at 10:55 am
I’d guess that’s why VoteCompass is a separate non-governmental organization from the CBC: they’re collecting and holding the personal information outside the jurisdiction of the Privacy Act. It turns out save does work, just very inelegantly.
Here are relevant source citations:
Jared
31 Mar 11 at 9:01 am
[...] fundamental issues of the campaign and summarize their party’s platforms. If someone were to invest only 1 hour in a political race, a televised debate is in the running (a local all-candidates’ meeting is more effort). [...]
In Defense of Debate at MentalPolyphonics
31 Mar 11 at 5:03 pm