Tags: Election
Tactical Votes
May 4th, 2005, by Rich.
With the UK General election all but upon us, politicians have turned their attention to tactical talk. Mr. Blair insists this is a two horse race, and suggests that voting for the Liberal Democrats will let the Conservatives in. Mr. Howard suggests the voting for the Liberal Democrats will give Labour another chance.
Curiously then, the results of an online poll of 250,000 people at WhoShouldYouVoteFor.com, suggests that where policy is concerned, tomorrows election is anything but the two horse race that Blair and Howard are painting it to be.
What the graph suggests is that if people were to vote for the party whose policies best matched their own beliefs, the Liberal Democrats would walk it.
What’s not shown on the poll is any demographic detail of those polled. Given that the site has only recently been created the people who have discovered it are are most likely to be young, internet savvy and politically aware. The upshot of this is that the Labour and Conservative parties are probably safe to target their marketing and scare tactics at floating voters in the middle ground, for now.
By the time the 2009/10 election comes around, it’s highly likely that sites such as this will be far more sophisticated, and have a significantly better reach, hopefully relieving more of the public from the apparent necessity of tactical voting, perhaps resulting in a more representative parliament
Political utopia here we come?
May 4th, 2005 at 11:41 am
That website is utter rubbish. It’s completely biased; everyone I know has come out Lib Dem - yes, including the people who I consider to be alarmingly right wing. I don’t know that it’s necessarily deliberately biased; more that it’s far too simplistic, and makes no allowance for ranking of your opinions, or clarification of answers - eg (I forget what the questions were) ‘The UK should not have unlimited immigration’ and ‘The UK should not refuse entry to legitimate asylum seekers’ are two very different ways of phrasing a question dealing with the same very broad issue, which will elicit very different responses (except what the Tories and now everyone else are very cunningly concealing is that immigration and asylum are in fact not the same issue at all… anyway…)
Alternatively, someone may consider it to be true that the Iraq war was wrong (thus suggesting Lib Dems) and also believe Labour’s other policies outweigh that - the website makes no allowance for this kind of ‘balancing’.
I do know one person who came out as Green, who is in fact Labour through and through. Holding ‘green’ opinions does not mean that one would agree with the Green Party’s policies - they would need alarmingly high levels of state control to enact the policies they intend to.
Anyway. That website is notoriously biased!
May 4th, 2005 at 1:16 pm
This problem would map nicely into the Vector Space Model which could cope with a far more detailed set of statements than this years WSYVF.com.
Each statement would define a dimension in v-space. The respondent’s acceptance or rejection of each statement is then modeled as a distance along it’s vector. The respondent would be free to assign as much or as little value to any statement, from zero to plus or minus anything. When the user is finished, the largest number is normalized to 1.0 and all other numbers are proportionally reduced to other values less than one . This would provide the balancing that Jo quite rightly highlights is missing.
P.S. Everyone I know came out Lib Dem / Green too.
May 4th, 2005 at 2:54 pm
That would be much more interesting - the problem with this kind of thing, though, is that it’s incredibly difficult not to ask loaded questions. For example, http://www.politicalcompass.org has a good idea, but some of the questions are inescapably leading - it asks you to agree or disagree with statements such as ‘It is regrettable that many personal fortunes are made by people who simply manipulate money and contribute nothing to their society.’ or ‘The only social responsibility of a company should be to deliver a profit to its shareholders.’ - it’s difficult to escape the idea that some of these are effectively asking ‘do you consider yourself to be a bad person? tick yes or no’