31–40 of 168 posts
For me, the novelty of this tool has worn off. You have to select "answers" to all kinds of specific issues, even when you don't know any details or care about something. Like "we should stop burning coal" - obviously we should, as fast as possible. But stopping tomorrow won't work, neither will treating every part of the country the same way. Is this the most urgent measure we can do for climate? You just can't answ…
I hope not too many people base their voting decision on the amount of similarity they have in their answers with parties. The way questions are phrased do not always give parties a way to answer (Yes/No/Neutral) in the same way. As an example, 2 parties could both say No to a higher Co2-tax, but one of them does so because they claim climate change is a hoax, while the other one has a problem with it not being progr…
The biggest problem with Wahl-O-Mat in my view is that it only looks at what parties claim they will do, not their historical voting record. There had been some discussion around this topic this election cycle, so perhaps they will try to address it in future iterations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The site deinwal.de tries to address this by letting you vote on past bills and then showing you who votes most similar to you. However, for opposition parties this doesn't work reliably since they'll sometimes vote against something if it doesn't go far enough or if they disagree with the implementation details, even if they agree with the general idea. Unless you read up on the vote, these nuances will be missed. I…
I am one of the creators of deinwal.de Your description is spot on, although we tried to exclude votes where something did not "go far enough" for some parties. AMA.
- Is it useful to soberly look at an analysis of a few chosen questions and topics instead of looking at the fuller picture, like for example scandals the parties are involved in? How would a tool look like that includes both?
- The implicit stances of the parties do not seem to really come out. The questions seem to not be designed for that purpose. Is this a limitation of the questions asked, a limitation of the format or are there other limiting factors?
Is voting based on matching your exact ideology a good idea? You could have a system where everyone has a party that represents their views exactly, but democracy is about compromise, which takes political skill. This should be a factor in voting. In the UK, up until recently we had a pretty far left guy called Jeremy Corbyn in charge of Labour, the largest left wing party. I was pretty aligned with him on a his idea…
This is not really comparable to the largely antagonistic two party system of the UK (or the US) where conflict between individuals and leader figures feature so heavily.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The site deinwal.de tries to address this by letting you vote on past bills and then showing you who votes most similar to you. However, for opposition parties this doesn't work reliably since they'll sometimes vote against something if it doesn't go far enough or if they disagree with the implementation details, even if they agree with the general idea. Unless you read up on the vote, these nuances will be missed. I…
This doesn't even work that well for the governing parties. Coalition governments are based on the parties making compromises where their positions disagree. This means that in particular the smaller partner(s) have to vote against their own program most of the time if they want to at least get their core issues through the parliament. Unfortunately, an alarming number of people seem not to know this.
It's a choice to vote against what a party claims to be their values in order to maintain stability in the coalition. The smaller party could also take a chance knowing the larger party won't abandon their comfy government position over it.
It's also interesting to figure out which values or plans a party has been willing to compromise on, since none of them publicly state this before elections.
I feel like these tools work best if you just use them as an additional data point in your decision.