Today, we had European elections in Germany.
We have the Wahl-O-Mat, a state-funded service, where you can answer 38 questions, and then match your positions against a selection of or all political parties that could be elected. It then shows you how much overlap (a percentage) you have with the various parties and their answers to those questions.
I find this to be a very important and useful tool for citizen information.
Campaign adverts are shallow and colorful PR. Broad slogans.
Individuals are not necessarily what the broader party policies are and how they vote. Personal sympathy can even be misleading in that a sympathetic person may not hold the values and positions you do.
Voting for a party, I think their program and stances should be the primary decision factor. (Alongside assessment of whether you can trust them of course.)
It obviously and drastically shows you misconceptions about parties and your alignment, and shows you parties relevant to you that you may not have known about before.
Do other countries have something/things like that too? A tool to match personal stance against political parties’ stances? [In a concrete and up-to-date way.]
Australia has ABC Vote Compass, but it has some oddities based on issues with our political/media landscape:
- it only places you relative to the three top parties
- all the questions are specific election wedge issues (mostly between the top two parties) rather than broader ideological questions, and so it only updates in the run up to each federal (read: national, Australia wide) election
- it takes politicians statements at face value, and doesn’t factor in actual behaviour in power which is often at odds (if you’re curious, look up the history of high speed rail or nuclear power in Australia. Both have been used for electioneering again and again, neither exist despite the advocating party winning)
But does this not centalize power to the team who develop the Wahl-OMat? They could scew the results in multiple ways:
- Imagine they put in a bias to automatically substract some “overlapping percentage” points of your favorite party
- Overvaluing certain question topics while ignoring other topics. Topics enter and leave public discourse over time, Wahl-OMat needs to adjust accordingly.
There should be multiple Wahl-OMat services to choose from imo…
I don’t see how alternatives to choose from solve your issue though. I’d rather have one or few trustworthy ones.
There are/were alternatives. I looked at two others.
Results are transparent.
