I did a survey about a year ago among 26 friends using the Political Compass. If I were to predict their choice of political party I would say that they would likely vote in the following manner:
10 Conservative4 Liberal5 NDP1 Bloc Québequois6 Green
BUT after taking the Political Compass quiz, they nearly all (23) placed left economically of the NDP and, though in wide array, much more socially liberal than the Conservatives, Liberals and Greens. Thus, my conclusion is that people essentially do not vote based on party platforms, but rather on their preference for a party leader (or dislike of the others) or based on how the people in their culture perceive the party's platforms to be.
My challenge to you all is to take the Political Compass quiz and then to vote for the political party that best represents your views in Parliament.
Another word on this election tomorrow. Our country would be so much more healthy if we had both proportional representation and a run-off for prime minister in a second election with the leaders of the top two parties in the election vying for the position. This is how it works in many countries. My guess is that the result would look something like this:
108 Conservative80 Liberal54 NDP31 Bloc Québecois27 Green
And the Prime Minister would likely be the Liberal leader as NDP supporters would throw their vote that way rather than towards the conservatives in the run-off. Bloc and Green supporters would probably be split between the Conservatives and Liberals.
Then again, if everyone voted based on their own views and according to party platforms, we'd probably have an NDP majority in the House of Commons.
5 comments:
I'm at -4.75 on the economic left, but sitting directly on the authoritarian/libertarian fence at zero. So how should I vote? New Democrats are as far left as I can get, but Green is closest to center on the vertical scale.
When we were in Montreal (Gilles Duceppe's home riding - ugh) we had 9 choices:
-Conservatives
-NDP
-Liberal
-Bloc
-Green
-Marxist/Leninist
-Communist
-Marijuana
-Independent
In what was probably a gross injustice to the democratic process, I don't remember searching out the platform for the independent to give everyone a fair crack.
Well that was very interesting. Of course the election is over by now, but it was still cool to do the test and see where I ended up. Unfortunately, I am more of a scientist than a student of social studies so some of this went over my head.
Interesting but I would argue that the logical conclusion from your results is that the test does not do a good job of accurately capturing viewpoints.
Various social (or economic) issues are weighted equally whereas in reality people respond in different ways to different issues.
Some of the questions are so extreme in nature that they fail to adequately capture nuance or qualifiers.
Steve Koehn
Steve, I hear what you're saying and I agree to an extent. Political Compass would do a greater service by even showing how they make their calculations, but they don't want to... Oh well. I think it does show a valuable aspect of how we believe and vote.
Economic Left/Right: -1.62
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: 0.46
It would be interesting to see how they come to their results.
Most people would likely vote different if the platforms didn't have parties attached to them.
I will NEVER vote Liberal and have voted PC all my life. I actually like the Green platform...but am not sure how it would affect me so I went again with the 'safe' vote. Maybe in a few elections they might be relevant. The NDP scares me. I think they would turn us into a welfare state. I've worked hard on my career and would not appreciate more of my earned money going to the government.
In reality, all the parties have some good points to their platform. I would however like to see change in political voting process. The 'first past the poll' isn't right in my opinion but I don't really know other ways that would make if better and fair.
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