Web-Based Assistant Changes the Face of Dutch Politics 190
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?"
Too many choices (Score:4, Funny)
Not enough choices (Score:2)
And they call that "freedom"...
Ob. Hicks (Score:2)
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In 2004, he would have been the lesser evil. Probably good that he waited til 2008 to run.
more info (Score:5, Informative)
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).
Too easy to create bias (Score:5, Insightful)
- 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...Re: (Score:2)
-jfedor
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Personally I'd rather some one was horribly bias but made t
Re:Too easy to create bias (Score:4, Informative)
It also helps to read the question properly.
Easy.. (Score:2)
Your examples attempt to provide advice in the question, which there is no reason for. Just simplify the question down to the core of what is being asked, and ensure that there is no bias. Presumably if these questions are checked by the political parties beforehand, they would have a period to complain about any bias that slips through.
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If anything, this could
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-Tez
Re:Too easy to create bias (Score:4, Informative)
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OK, that's a cold read; my point is that politics isn't played as dirty in Europe as it is in most other places. It's actually possible to trust cross-political groups to try and be fair. Not all are, yet many are, and doing unfair handling is seen as a big deal, as sticking a knife in the back of the people. Gerrymandering and other forms of sanctioned election cheating are seen as unacceptable here.
So, you objection tend
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"Do you think that pirates should be able to profit from the hard work of starving Musicians, or should we implement enforced DRM to protect the rights of content producers?"
"Do you think we should let terrorists attack this country without reprise, and use nuclear weapons against us, or should we invade iraq and stop them?"
And yes, I have stopped beating my wife!
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* Would you want to pay extra taxes to grant benefits to the most incompetent of farmers? NO
So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
I admid it (Score:2)
Actually, i could have voted for the first foreign sounding female on their list (AKA the 'troetelturk'[toyforeigner]) but these don't show pictures. So I am just happy i
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Now, if those two groups did actually take the test, it wouldn't be a step, it would be a leap ahead. Unfortunately, they don't. They still vote for the same parties or for the buzzwords.
Most vote the way their parents voted. (Score:2)
However it really doesn't matter if your electoral system collapses any voting result to a two party state. Or if you can form a majority government with the support of just 36% of the population.
Voting Compass (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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My experience with kiskompas.nl is a bad one. It looks like it's more accurate and has more nuance, but some questions are just wrong.
For example, the question "Turkey must join the EU". I think Turkey should only be allowed to join the EU when they fulfill all the requirements (which they don't), and even then they're not required to join, but just allowed. So I voted "disagree", and ended up opposed to my favorite party, who was considered to agree
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Revealing what was always there? (Score:4, Informative)
The problem with the OKCupid test is... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Does it? From my experience, Libertarians only have a few things in common with liberals. When it comes to economic issues, they are pretty far-right.
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Just like the Dutch liberal conservatives. Economic liberalism means open market, privatise everything, and let the corporations figure it out for themselves.
Thing is, "liberal" comes from "liber", freedom. And who doesn't like freedom? Yet, everybody has their own ideas about what kind of freedom they want. The freedom to use your money for profit the
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Does it? From my experience, Libertarians only have a few things in common with liberals. When it comes to economic issues, they are pretty far-right.
In the real world (as opposed to America), liberalism includes economic policies; free markets, light or no government regulation, little or no subsidies. The economic policies are the inevitable result of the philosophy of personal freedom. Somehow in America, the word liberal has been redefined to mean left wing, closest in policy to social-democrat; socially liberal but fiscally social, as opposed to liberal.
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Simplified (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I'm voting for Fortuyn! (Score:2, Informative)
Here are the 30 topics, each of which you are asked to 'agree' with or 'disagree' with.
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Or put in another way I personally think that he was probably a rather honest and well meaning guy with a very dangerous streak in politics: thinking that things can made "simple".
There is always a danger for idealist to become fascist by going the following route: "XYZ is bad", "this group insist on doing XYZ", you explain to them that XYZ is really bad, they do not listen, you explain again, they still do not
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He was openly gay, which makes him by definition a lefty in the US. But he was he was a rich dandy, against muslim immigrants, and he wanted strong measures to protect "our way of life", which can also fit in well with the far right side of the political spectrum. I think many of his followers prefered to ignore the fact that he was gay.
Well, at least he got gay rights firmly entrenched in the right side
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The christian democrats here (CDA) are opposed to gay marriage, euthanasia, soft drugs etc while our most prominent right winged party (VVD) isn't.
The left winged party also has no problems with these issues.
To put them on a left v. right schale has no use here in the netherlands...
Weird stuff indeed. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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I used the Stemwijzer merely as to see if it would fit my final decision; Which it didn't.
Most of the questions (as opposed to other years) also seemed to have an unfair balance in how they were asked (think of the 'would you like to trade in more privacy for less terrorism'-question).
And yes, I looked after the results afterwards (and so did my f
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Your "leftist party first, right wing party second" result could be indicitive of the difficulties of compressing the variety of political standpoints into a single "left right" spectrum.
Have you seen the political compass [politicalcompass.org]? It uses two dimensions instead of one to represent political positions. See here [politicalcompass.org] for an example of what it looks like.
I'm obviously speculating wildly here, because I don't know anything about either your politics or Dutch politics in general, but could it be that the two parties we
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It also sucks.
Freedom of choice (Score:2, Informative)
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/ [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/ [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 an
maybe (Score:2)
A danger with voting guides, however, is that the question and terminology are vague. "Spending less on defense" can mean anything from a 1% reduction in the budget to getting rid of the military.
In any case, nobody is stopping people from using common sense together with these voting guides. If you find that your positio
We need a military (Score:2)
First shades of something new? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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That would be called "democracy."
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I would change this part. Instead, I'd want voting records consulted to determine each party's position on a given issue. Of course, riders become a problem. "They voted to kill all the cute little puppies. Oh wait, the bill they voted against said Save the puppies and kill all humans." You'd have to take the full wording of the bill into account.
Voter involvement in the Internet Age (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Dutch politics not two party system (Score:2)
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Or actually, you could offcourse come up with a system which does this. But it will only function properly is you and everybody else spend as much time investigating and considering the issues as your politicians do (or should do), which happens to be a full time job. Worse yet, a more then full time job, even when you leave some issues to others. Which is why we choose a bunch of people to do that job for us, so we get to do the interesting work.
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But for standalone issues, yeah, why not?
So many stemwijzers, only one vote! (Score:2, Insightful)
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!
What, this is surprising? (Score:3, Insightful)
So an infusion of ten minutes' worth of information caused a shift away from the political middle.
And you are surprised by this?
useful tool (Score:2, Insightful)
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 inform
Other factors (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
MartRe: (Score:3, Informative)
The reason for this shift is simply because large parts of the population aren't happy with the current government.
Nothing new (Score:3, Funny)
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Anyway, this works because here in the Netherlands there are traditionally more parties than the big 2 represented.
Extreme results make sense (Score:2)
I voted in said elections (Score:2, Insightful)
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 i
It should be obvious (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
To be expected (Score:2)
But individual people, who don't have to appease a lot of people or make well thought out defences of their views, will have a set of views that would be considered quite outside the mainstream.
this is great (Score:2)
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 men
Compulsory voting in Australia (Score:2)
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statistics show? (Score:2)
In Soviet Russia (Score:2)
In Soviet Russia, politics changes your face! (In Ukraine too I hear).
In USA the "Voting Assistant" changes the votes of US citizens.
Or should I say the tools "help" the tools vote for more tools.
The American Version (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is that candidates don't feel the need [vote-smart.org] 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 [wsj.com] 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.
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Stomwijzer (Score:2)
For people who understand dutch, try the stomwijzer [stomwijzer.nl]. It is fun.
Well maybe (Score:2)
Now we start the "formation" period :-) (Score:2)
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.
Mayb
I used something like that ... (Score:2)
I used some vote-web-assistant before last election in Slovakia few months ago and I found it very helpfull.
At the end I did vote as the assistant recommended (even if I originaly did not plan to) because thanks to this advice I contacted the party recommended and get some good response from them.
Of course, I do not deem such assistants as "100% correct" (given all the bias: politicians "lying" in their program, assistant author making some maybe even deliberate "mistakes", etc.) but I consider them as go
OOOOH, Comparison shopping! (Score:2)
After examining the links found in the replies and elsewhere, My criticism of the Dutch guide is that it is too short, the English questions appear to contain some biases, there is no ranking of important issues or criteria, the guide does not seem to score individual candidates against a ranking of issues and criteria (because that's missing), and therefo
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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
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All that was missing from this one was a "don't care" option. Oh, and a question on software patents.
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Re:Interesting (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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.
Wh
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Y'know, I think you may have just come up with a new independent funding model for the ABC...
Seriously though, you're right. Go read Family First's policies on their website [familyfirst.org.au]. Overall, apart from one or two issues, it looks fairly progressive doesn't it? Yet, regardless of your political leaning, yo
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That's a good question. If people blindly obey these online tests, the makers of the tests become very powerful. But how accurate and objective can the test really be? This test advised VVD party leader Rutten to vote for D66, a slightly less conservative liberal party. And although this test advised me to vote for GroenLinks (I'm a member of that party, so that sounds accurate enough), another test that was supposed to be more accurate [kieskompas.nl] urged me to vote PvdA, SP or even D66,
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IP Addresses have nothing to do with it.
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You needed "deliberative democracy" (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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I have heard it called a "Citizens Jury", or "Citizens Assembly"
but I agree, with you randomly selected people who are well informed make decent decisions.
but One of the major problems with this situation as We In Canada are finding out with
* http://www.citizensassembly.bc.ca/ [citizensassembly.bc.ca]
* http://www.citizensassembly.gov.on.ca/ [gov.on.ca]
is that the people who "educate" the jury have a a strong impact on the decision, many people think that the BC Assembly's outco
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You don't have to try extreme choices. I gave very reasonable, predictable answers, and ended up at SP, and later at GL. Not sure what I answered differently that last time though. And I think my answers would have fit ChristenUnie at least as well as SP en GL, so I don't know why I didn't end up there.
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Classic!
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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?
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Here you can distinguish right-left, individualist-collectivist, conservative-progressive, nationalist-internationalist, religious-secular. A left, collectivist, conservative, internationalist, religious person could for instance vote CU (a winner), a left, collectivist, conservative, nationalist, secular person instance vote SP (the biggest winner), a right, in
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They abandoned their maoist background in 1972. The SP is mainly a party that wants to solve problems for "the common man", which explains their popularity. He appeals to a lot of normal, average people, whereas GroenLinks (which is much more l
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It's a party which cares more for the people than for economuc numbers, face it, the last govt went so much for saving (on the wrong things if I may add) that the poorest people in our society actually became poorer. For such a rich country as the Netherlands this is NOT acceptable...
Further the SP has left the maoistic model ages ago and I still want them to change name to "Sociale Partij" (Social Party) instead of "Socialistische Partij" (Socialistic Party) if only to
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