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?"

Too many choices

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.

more info

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).

Too easy to create bias

Well... then what about the two following questions:

• 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...

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Ask both. Include an answer that says "I won't answer this question, because it is phrased incorrectly.". Compare your answers with the answers of the politicians. Vote for the one who agrees with you on most questions (add weighs if you like), treating th

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You will never get rid of bias though...Even my own personal bias over rode your second question there easily; I've been on the land and I know flooding - while it does get those who are to stupid to build proper flood protection and damming - destroys muc

Re:Too easy to create bias

survive the flood of imported goods?

It also helps to read the question properly.

Easy..

How about you just ask "Should the government supply financial aid to farmers?"

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

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I would agree if the site was sponsored by a political party or has its own agenda for pushing in one direction or another. It is likely, though, that such sites live and exist because all parties can support their way of asking. Since the parties asked us

Re:Too easy to create bias

The questions were very straightforward. "Should landlords be allowed to decide their own rent?" "Should people under 27 continue to receive social security?" "Should animal rights be included in the constitution?" Even the trickiest hot-button question (in the US, at least) was about as neutral as possible: "Should tackling the terrorism problem take priority over individual freedoms and liberties?"

So what?

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 admid it

Ok, you are totaly right: I never made the effort to read any of those propaganda fliers. I only got those for two parties so that was what my choices were limited to. The choice was not that hard: one had a bald man on front, the other a nice woman of my

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Well, looking around me, there were two big group of voters before the advent of 10 minute tests: The traditional voter (who votes for 'his' party because he always did) and the buzzword voter (who votes for whatever party has the smartest slogan).

Now, if

Voting Compass

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.

Revealing what was always there?

If it opens people's eyes to parties outside the usual two, I'm in favor of it. Play with the OkCupid politics test [okcupid.com] 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.

The problem with the OKCupid test is...

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.

 

Simplified

Can politics be simplified to a ten minute test?

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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10 minutes is an improvement upon the 1 minute people usually care about the subject for while they're voting, if at all.

I'm voting for Fortuyn!

Well, apparently. After being asked the 30 questions, they suggest I vote for Fortuyn, which translates to what, exactly?

Here are the 30 topics, each of which you are asked to 'agree' with or 'disagree' with.

• 1 Citizens should elect the prime minister.

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If he is American "voting" for the Wim Fortuyn list is actually quite "bleading hearth" left wing, after all he was for the liberalisation of drugs, and apparently equal rights for gay people.

Weird stuff indeed.

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.

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At the end you can click on the name of the party and it will show you everything that you and the party agree on and everything you don't agree on. Maybe you just don't know yourself or your understanding of these parties is limited?

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I think I am more informed of the parties out there than the general dutch man and I did my research of what I wanted to vote for this time around, and -why-.
I used the Stemwijzer merely as to see if it would fit my final decision; Which it didn't.
Most o

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Well, yes, it does appear to lack some weighting for the party (you get to supply weighting for your answers though) so that could result in some skewed results.

Freedom of choice

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 mo

maybe

Maybe voting on issues isn't a good way of voting in a democracy. But that's what we believe democracy is currently about and that's a good place to start from if we want to improve it.

A danger with voting guides, however, is that the question and termin

We need a military

If only to weed out the gunnuts and other looniebin characters. Give 'em some toys to play with and some ways to retreat themselves from the genepool and it makes out society a bit nicer. Just make sure the headloony does not declare war on you.

First shades of something new?

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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Ultimately this won't work due to voter indifference. Another problem with this approach is that risk-taking and unpopular but needed decisions will become nonexistent.

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Instead of voting on parties, why not vote on issues?

That would be called "democracy."

Voter involvement in the Internet Age

Can't we just vote for the policies directly, rather than vote for the people who will vote for the policies? The internet gives us the tool to become much more directly involved in the running of the country.

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

You proposal (referenda for everything) would seriously hamper budgetting, as most people choose for more money for [insert favourite employee group here]. It would give responsibility to a lot of people without making them really responsible. If you have

So many stemwijzers, only one vote!

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

What, this is surprising?

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

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, an

Other factors

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

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The strong shift to both extremes was indicated by polls before the introduction of the many online tests. As a result, we can conclude that the online tests didn't have a significant influence.

The reason for this shift is simply because large parts of the

Nothing new

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?

Extreme results make sense

Most major parties have platforms that are compromises which only tend toward an ideological position. Many individuals have organized political beliefs; the consistency of those beliefs results in a net political position characterized as "extreme". When

I voted in said elections

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 idea

It should be obvious

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.

The American Version

Something like this has been tried in America every election since 1992 by a non-profit organization called Project Vote Smart [vote-smart.org]. They try to enlist the help of the local media to pressure candidates into filling out their issues questionnaire called the National Political Awareness Test [vote-smart.org] (NPAT). Here [vote-smart.org] is the version that candidates for the US Congress were asked to fill out in 2006.

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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Seriously, the way it works is just pure propaganda. It reduces choices to black or white.

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 re

Re:Interesting

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.

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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

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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.

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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 opinio

You needed "deliberative democracy"

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deliberative_democra c y [wikipedia.org]

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 cas

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Somehow not many people took their advice, which is always D66. D66 went from 6 to 3 seat in parliament. But nice of them to characterise potential D66 voters as stupid ;)

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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, howe

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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.