HELP IS at hand for indecisive voters in Sunday’s parliamentary elections, after three academic institutions developed a website to guess the party that most closely fits your views.
The European University of Cyprus, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the e-Democracy centre University have teamed up to create cyprusvotecompass.org, after the platform was successfully piloted in Greece last October.
The website asks 30 questions on a range of social, political and economic topics, including the government’s past successes and failures and contentious issues like the Cyprus problem, immigration and same sex marriage.
For each question, users can select a range of responses from strong disagreement to strong agreement.
The website then compares response patterns with state party policies to gauge the overlap.
Centre for Democracy Director Fernando Mendez said yesterday: “We had a successful deployment of this tool in Greece, and some of the people involved in Greek politics knew about Cyprus, so it was a natural progression to bring it to Cyprus.”
Asked about the software, Mendez said the priority for researchers was to choose questions that could divide users while remaining relevant to them. “The questions should be salient and not too esoteric, but they should also be likely to separate the users.”
By the end of the week, Mendez expects around 10,000 people will have completed the questionnaire; although only 5,000 to 6,000 will contain useful data, because of the number of people who are not answering seriously.
“We expect around two per cent of the voting population to complete the test” he said.
The results may well follow the voting on Sunday, but for now it is too early to say if they are representative of the nation, and the tool cannot be certain of a winner: “Party identification of users are roughly equivalent for the two main parties, but we can’t use it to predict the outcome,” said Mendez.
Extremists may be disappointed with the site, which does not include the smallest parties such as ELAM. As Mendez explains, this is because of the extensive research needed to map out the policy positions of the main parties.
Nevertheless, the site does cover most of the political spectrum, and individuals’ results are likely to reflect an affiliation with a party that stands a chance of winning seats.
DIKO: the apathetic voter’s best bet
TO TEST the site, the Cyprus mail completed two surveys. The first took and extremely progressive stance on all positions, variously approving of same sex marriage, liberal economic policies and support for Turkish EU accession and a bizonal, bicommunal federation.
The results showed a clear winner: for dyed in the wool pinko-liberals, AKEL remain the best bet with a 42 per cent correlation.
The results were even more conclusive for staunch conservatives. By strongly disagreeing with every suggested statement that endorses social change or tackling social inequality – or for that matter progress on the Cyprus Problem – there was a clear winner.
EVROKO leads with a 48 per cent correlation, followed by DIKO with 38 per cent. AKEL actually receive minus 32 per cent correlation for this survey.
There is also an option for ‘neither agree nor disagree’ for every statement.
Choosing this response for all 30 questions results in a 55 per cent correlation with Green Party ideals, 63 per cent correlation with socialist EDEK and a surprising 67 per cent correlation with DIKO, suggesting they could be the apathetic voter’s best bet.
However, as Mendez points out, most voters are likely to hold a position on at least one question, and that this response pattern is more likely to fit the profile of a monkey.
On a positive note, strong disagreement with every statement results in a low correlation with all parties, suggesting that they do all stand for something at least.
