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Web-Based Assistant Changes the Face of Dutch Politics
An anonymous reader writes "The elections held in The Netherlands on Wednesday have shaken the country. Almost 10 million votes were cast, and statistics show that a full half of those who voted used a popular web-based voter guide. This guide is operated by the independent institute for the public and politics. Advice is given to the visitor upon answering a number of multiple choice questions on some common political topics. Statistically, a number of people ended up scoring in support of populist parties both on the far left and far right. No bias was reported to exist in the test itself. However, these parties have ended up with an unforeseen amount of power as a result of the election. The voter participation was high, and the web-based advisories may have motivated people with little interest in politics to cast a vote anyway. Can politics be simplified to a ten minute test?"
In the U.S., it's much simpler. Just vote for the lesser of two evils. Not that they'll count your vote properly, anyway.
It should be noted that this voting aid is endorsed by all major political parties who actually submit questions to it. The party leaders are also the first to take the test (this time the liberal leader actually did not end up with his own party at all after doing it...bummer :(
In the end you can compare your answer to the one of each political party. There they argue why they give this answer, making it a rather nice tool to learn more about the programs without reading the entire manuscripts, but it is definitely more then just the 30 questions.
Another interesting thing is that there is no large correlation between the suggested votes and those actually casted, indicating that people do not follow the advise blindly. In reality, many people here try a number of these web-based aids (kieskompas.nl is another one).
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
Does anybody actually believe that before there were 10-minute web-based tests, everybody used to go out and read all the different parties' complete programs and base their decision on a comprehensive analysis of them all? Ofcourse not, people used to base it on soundbytes and whether someone appears to be trustworthy. So from that perspective, using a 10-minute test to base your choice on some actually relevant political issues is a great step forward.
I tried Stemwijzer, but the questions where too simple with only yes and no as possible answers.
I tried Kieskompas.nl and they had better questions, followup questions and at the end you could compare your "score" with that of the political parties that answered the same questions accompanied by extra explanations and motivations to give you a better idea about their standing on the subjects.
That was a better website to "quickly" get informed.
This is the sig that says NI (again)
If it opens people's eyes to parties outside the usual two, I'm in favor of it. Play with the OkCupid politics test if you haven't already. It's run by the same mathematicians who designed TheSpark way back when, and features the same scarily-insightful ratings engine.
umm, that isn't anything like what propaganda is.
From m-w.com:
1 capitalized : a congregation of the Roman curia having jurisdiction over missionary territories and related institutions
2 : the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person
3 : ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one's cause or to damage an opposing cause; also : a public action having such an effect
How does "It reduces choices to black or white" satisfy any of those definitions?
In simple terms:
You are not voting online... The program is recommending you a party to choose when you do go and vote.
We are also dicussing the option of making the actual ballot like this as well, with the ability to recommend a party.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
Surely if politics can be simplified into ten second soundbites and mud slinging ads repeated over and over again, it can be simplified to a ten minute test.
In fact ten minute test sound heck of a lot better than "tough on terrorism" and "tough on drugs" as a basis for a vote.
it's not an online voting system, it's a recommendation system. There's no reason at all why something similar couldn't be used in the USA.
IP Addresses have nothing to do with it.
Advanced users are users too!
Here are the 30 topics, each of which you are asked to 'agree' with or 'disagree' with.
WANRING: This warning is misspelt.
The same happened to me; As a dutch voter I also tried out the 'Stemwijzer', and encountered a very strange advice of what to vote for, namely the 'Partij voor de Dieren' ; or 'Party for Animals', a leftish party who is fighting for more animal rights, but has not too much opinions on stuff that -also- matters.
The strange thing though; Second on the advice was 'EénNL' ; Or One NL , a party who is very much leaning to the right.
Other friends of mine also got very strange advices (ranging from hardcore religious to far-right parties), and while we could see that the tool was clearly unbalanced (either by asking the wrong questions, or by having some weird measurement being used) and its results should be taken with a grain of salt, we were worried for others who would take this advice regardless.
The end-result, where both extreme-left as extreme right had a victory, might have had some of its origin in the advice dealt out by this site.
Then again, relying on twenty one-liners to determine a final vote is not really that good a thing in the first place.
Well, this election in the Netherlands some people concerned with the abovementioned effect (viz. a newspaper and a university) have created http://www4.kieskompas.nl/a competing site(unfortunately no english verions available) which wanted to provide a more graduated result. Hell, there was even http://www.partijwijzer.nl/a similar website(currently offline for obvious reasons, i.e. elections are over) aimed at younger (age < 30) voters.
As long as there are more than one what-should-I-vote websites and most people visit several, I don't see the problem.
- Should the government aid farmers, letting them survive the flood of imported goods?
- Would you want to pay extra taxes to grant benefits to the most incompetent of farmers?
It's all about who gets to edit the questions...The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Living as we do in the information age, there's clearly a lot more that can be done with voting than we're doing at the moment.
For example, we could have 'continuous voting'. Everybody who is eligible to vote can log into a website at any time, on any day of the year, and change their standing vote. Every day the totals and trends are made public, and a sufficient shift in opinion changes who is in power. (With some buffering, obviously -- e.g. you need a majority of 60% for six months to cause a switch, but a majority of 80% will cause power to change hands in a month).
Instead of voting on parties, why not vote on issues? Then let the parties declare their positions on each issue, and match the one to the other.
I'm not saying these would work better than current systems, necessarily -- but think of the possibilities! Of course there's vast scope for broken systems that lead to bad things happening... but then, that's nothing new.
I'd rather answer 10 or 100 questions on my opinions and have them fed directly into the policymaking than have to choose between two major parties, one incompetent and the other dishonest.
I do not have the impression that people actually take it as an advice. There are now so many "stemwijzers" online with so many different systems and outcomes that people do not take them too serious.
The best thing about the "stemwijzers" is that they get a discussion going about the programmes of the different political parties and that they might point you to possibilities you hadn't really considered. After all, there are so many parties to choose from here in the Netherlands!
I'll take a break from my usual privacy based point of view on topics like this and say I'm all for this idea. My city voted on a very important deal (in relation to water) recently and went for the popularity contest option instead of the informed opinion and now we are screwed - no water plans when we run out in 08 and plenty of towns queuing up to steal what water we do have left. So I'm all for letting people have a place where they can go and put in their views and be given a party to support...In a day and age where people don't remember what parties stand for and then don't hold them accountable when they move to the left or right of that I think we should be getting people back into the swing of voting for what they believe instead of who they believe in (single person popularity contests etc). Note this would only be for advise and I don't believe it should replace going down to a polling booth to cast.
I ate your fish.
What if there had been bias on the test in favour of on or another far left, or worse, far right political party? It is surprising that there is so much trust and popularity in a simple web-based system in the first place. Then it's a good thing that every political party has to first agree to the questions. This isn't a matter of some guy in a dark room rolling a some bice and randomly picking questions. It take months of discussion to agree on these 30 questions. However one must doubt that anyone in their right mind would make an important political decision based on this alone.True, however, here in the sane world, we've got more then two real parties. With 20 parties to choose, would you seriously consider reading all their programs? or would you prefer if 'some web app' would show what is most likely to intrest you first?
So an infusion of ten minutes' worth of information caused a shift away from the political middle.
And you are surprised by this?
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
I think these tools are useful. There are not many people who read the full election programmes. Some of them are 106 pages!
Suppose you're an average informed voter and you're planning to vote for party A.
You take the tests at stemwijzer and kieskompas, and then you find out that you that you don't agree with a lot of the party's views. That gives you something to think about right? I think these tests stimulate people to think more about the views held by various political parties.
Voters end up more informed after using them, how is that bad?
Personally I already knew which party i was going to vote on before i used both sites: party X.
Remarkably the results from both sites were right on, both showed that i had very high similarity with party X
BTW, i think the headline is way off, "Web-Based Assistant Changes the Face of Dutch Politics" is a gross exaggeration.
Sure, there will always be group of people who base their vote solely on the tests, and that is regrettable, but i really don't think that it had much influence on the outcome of this election.
I think blaming the online test for the polarisation in Dutch politics is a bit short-sighted.
As some commentators remarked (for our Dutch readers, Rob Oudkerk among them), and consistent with what I hear around me, it is the waffling and trying to be everyone's friend of the centrist parties that drove voters to vote for politician that were actually willing to stand up for their beliefs.
A nice example is the centre-left PvdA (Labour party) waffling on the Armenian genocide. At first they were willing to go along with a hard line pushed by the (centre-)right that requiring a positive affirmation of the genocide by Turkish-descended politicians was a good idea, and when Turkish organisations made it abundantly clear that that would cost votes, the head honcho suddenly started waffling about whether or not the genocide would qualify as a genocide per se.
Disclosure: I voted for the definitely left-wing Socialist Party, so my view of Labour's waffling may be a bit biased.
Mart"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
IIRC, we (the dutch) have had the 'stemwijzer' for at least the last couple of elections. I think at least eight years now (paars 2, balkenende 1, 2 and 3), and it hasn't hit the news until today? I know slashdot can be a bit slow, but eight years?
And in the netherlands we have democracy in which seats of parliament are devided by percentage of votes (unlike the american "winner takes all" approach )
This means that we have dozens of parties competing per election.
Now all of them have their own ideas and standpoints, and having to read all their party programs is tedious and boring.
Seeing as most people are more interested in soccer matches than politics the "stemwijzer" is a very good way in finding out which party represents your view. I consider it to be a great aid in democracy as voters make more INFORMED choices regarding who to vote for.
(On a sidenote, I voted sp and I didn't need no stinkin "stemwijzer" to decide that, but then again I'm a political geek)
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
Just to make it clear, the pedophiles' party couldn't run. A party needs 570 pledges of support from voters (30 in each of the 19 districts) in order to take part in elections and they failed this requirement.
Today's politics can be summed up in 10 minutes. More and more people want to deal less and less with politics, thus politicians have to offer simple, 'in a nutshell' solutions for complex problems. If they can't, people get bored with them, don't listen to them and don't vote for them. They need to offer popular, easily understood slogans instead of elaborate, through discussions and plans.
That can easily be summed up in 10 minutes.
I also don't attribute the success of the radical parties to the online voting 'helper'. Rather I blame the general disappointment with politicians and, again, the need for popular, striking slogans. People want everything, and they want it now. Compromises are a thing of the past. They don't listen to both sides and try to find a middle way, instead they want their way, their vision (or, more often, a vision of someone else that appeals to them), without any regard or consideration for others. Radical, populistic parties offer that more easily than centric mass parties who have to try to appeal to as many people as possible, and thus cannot take a radical stance.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I would love to have this in US.
Not the web based voting guide . . . parties to choose from. Where governments are actually representative of the people rather than the lesser of two evils. Sure the president would be one of the two major parties . . . however, the deadlock in congress would be great. None with a majority . . . that would be awesome. No, new laws. Most of the dumb laws all have sunset provisions on them such as NCLB, patriot act, and whole bunch more would just go bye-bye.
Someone mentioned the http://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection I like this one thing it acuratly shows is the two dominat parties are both right (which I am) and authtorian. Of course they are. How would they not be.
After reading this I am going to have to check out http://www.badnarik.org/
-- A computer without Windoze is like a choclate cake without mustard
You go through a load of questions to get it down to a finely weighted and nuanced picture of your political beliefs... Then... It collapses the answer down to either you are a democrat or you are a republican...
Which kind of points out how fucked up the electoral system is.
Oooh they've improved it, now I come up Libertarian, which means Liberal in the real world.
Deleted
Well casting a vote is black and white... you are stuck voting for someone that you may not agree on in all issues.
Please sign petition to restore sanity to our banking system!!!
http://financialpetition.org/
see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deliberative_democrac y
Idea is: Add a fourth branch of government who replaces the presidential/gubernatorial veto with a "jury trial" by 100ish citizens. Each legislative faction could send advocates who'd make their case. If the jury vetos the law, the legislature can always try again later, but not immediately.
Point is: Researchers have found that citizens make better decissions on a jury then when voting.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Who catagorises the parties?
I'm going to vote in a state election tomorrow (Victoria Australia) and this week I received a few pieces of snail mail containing outright lies. Parties with similar policies lie about each other to try and win votes. In some areas they claim one set of policies, in others they switch, depending on who they're trying to impress. The same thing happens federally as well. You'd think that just publicity in the news media would expose this, but people seem too stupid to notice.
What safegaurds are there in this system stop such abuse? If it's not possible, I see no advantage to it.
I would prefer to see laws enacted where politicians who are shown to have gained office through deceit are put in stocks in public places and the people are charged 50c a piece of rotten fruit to throw at them. I know it's not sexy technological, but it would be much more satisfying, better for democracy in the long run and profitable.
I don't therefore I'm not.
The problem is that candidates don't feel the need to fill it out. They may get a little bit of bad publicity for not participating, but that's better for them than being pinned-down on where they stand on the issues. (See this article Politicians Grow Wary Of Survey as Internet Spreads Attack Ads on the topic from 10/25/26 issue of the Wall Street Journal).
Disclaimer: I used to work for Project Vote Smart about 10 years ago.
The thing that I liked most about the test was that you could say "don't know" to the questions. When was the last time you met someone who could have an informed opinion on every single one of those topics? Should Schiphol Airport continue to grow? How should I know?
All that was missing from this one was a "don't care" option. Oh, and a question on software patents.
Strength through redundancy and over-design
Hi all
:-)
I love it. Now we enter the "formation" period! No new laws for a while! I've often wondered why we don't keep the government in this "formation" state forever. They have plenty of laws already; no need for any new ones. This way the people can get used to the rules they have to abide, and find workarounds for the ones they dislike.
I've never noticed any harm from this standstill period. It seems to me the government is now doing what it should be doing; executing the laws that exist already.
Maybe we should have a lawmaking period of 1 year every 10 years, and the rest of the time a moratorium, or a cleanup period for obsolete laws; that would be nice.
Just my somewhat libertarian point of view