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 progressive enough, thus hitting poorer people harder than rich people.
Wahlomat is really great for 2 things though: First there are a lot of small parties, and while some of them probably deserve a seat at the table, it would be too much work to read all their programs. Wahlomat gives me the ability to presort some of the smaller parties, read their answers, and then maybe dig into their programs if I found that interesting.
The other thing is that Wahlomat is a great discussion starter. A few friends and I first did it all by ourselves, then went through our answers together. My opinion was shifted on a couple of these questions, shifting my overall position a bit, too.
This was something that I really noticed this year, not so much in the previous cycles. Maybe because my mind was already made up and the results really didn't reflect my expectations very well.
After you get your result, you can see the reasons why every party gave the answers they did, and reading those statements, especially on answer where your party of choice had different answers than your own were very insightful. I somehow doubt that too many people will put that much effort into it, though.
One question where this really stuck out to me was on a speed limit on all highways. One party that I am interested in gave the same answer I did, but their reasoning was superficial and shortsighted. Another small party gave the opposite answer but gave a fairly nuanced and convincing explanation on why they think a policy like that is incomplete.
Comparing the two, the former just sounded like political pandering and I very much hope enough people see through this and don't just give their votes to the top score.
The thing is, for people for whom going through the one paragraph of reasoning the parties actually give is too much, what better alternative is there?
Given the alternatives: Vote by personality vs vote by Wahl-o-mat score, I would 100% of the time encourage people to vote by Wahl-o-mat score.
Another problem is, that currently most parties are claiming to care all about the climate and would immediately take steps to fight the climate change after the election. Just if two of those parties have been in power for the last 8 years, you might want to weight their statement accordingly :)
Correct, there is a big difference to what is "said" and what is "done". There is no measurement in the Wahlomat that compares previous goals and success rates (e.g. for those parties who were in the coalition that ruled the last 20 years). Perhaps this can be best framed under the term "trustworthiness". But it also somehow applies to other parties: AfD has a pretty low trustworthiness because their goals and actions are often entirely contradictory - e.g. in their election program, they say they are for "transparency", but their party financing is the most intransparent of all.
Theoretically, a party could recognise something is needed during their first term, but feel they don't have a mandate from the voters until they've successfully been elected with it as one of their policies.
For example, if I was elected saying the tax on beer should be lower, but having met with health experts I've changed my mind and think it should be higher.
Of course, a cynic would say that's just an excuse for delaying, and a trick to play both sides...
Yes, theoretically. Here, there is no indication that something like that has happened. The pressing needs of climate change are not exactly new. Just a couple of weeks ago, they refused to include a term to require solar on all new buildings into law. And while claiming to on the fight against the climate change, they did not commit on any clear course of action, like tighter deadlines for the shutdown of coal power plants or bans for new ICE cars.
You might applaud me for changing my opinion when I learned new facts.
But your neighbour might see me as a liar, who promised one thing then did the opposite.
And your other neighbour might see me as part of a ruling elite that hears a clear statement of will from the people, then ignores it and does the opposite.
The Dutch Stemwijzer tends to have these stupid questions where they put a premise in the question. Something like "We need more red lights in the world, so all traffic lights should include red lights." Two parties can arrive at yes ("traffic lights should include red lights") and no ("we don't need more red lights in the world") as an answer and still have the same opinion ("not more red lights, but traffic lights need to have a red light").
This is a very common type of question in it and it fills me with immense frustration when using the tool.
The one redemption it has though, is that it allow parties to explain their reasoning when giving an answer. That makes a more detailed study of the issues easier.
So I generally still spent a while filling it in and studying the answers. (And then go vote the same way I always do... I find that I rarely care about the current political talking points and much more about the unexpected things that will come up in the coming years. For that you need someone that is trustworthy and has a similar ideology, not a party program.)
I'd say the election is still very emotional because people don't know if they can trust those statements.
Many young people were upset when upload filters were introduced after the politicians responsible had explicitly and publicly promised that there wouldn't be any.
Many old people were upset by the amount of corruption happening recently, from overpriced covid masks to 700 mio Eur in non-refundable deposit payments for a software project which was ultimately scrapped before it ever started.
And then there's the aspect that parties which have been in power for a long time and reduced support and subsidies for solar and wind energy are listed as caring about the climate.
That's because this table purely summarizes what parties have said they plan to do. But there is no reality check.
>Many young people were upset when upload filters were introduced after the politicians responsible had explicitly and publicly promised that there wouldn't be any.
> 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 progressive enough, thus hitting poorer people harder than rich people.
But as a voter who is in favour of a higher CO2 tax, why would you care about that distinction? If there's one party who thinks climate change doesn't exist and one who believes in climate change but is unwilling to do anything about it, the only difference between the parties is in their rhetoric. I'd argue that voting based on actual policy proposals a benefit, not a drawback of this approach.
> If there's one party who thinks climate change doesn't exist and one who believes in climate change but is unwilling to do anything about it
That's obviously not the distinction between the parties here. The second one intends (or at least has a policy to) do something about it, but just not by raising the existing CO2 tax. Maybe instead they intend to raise the top rate of income tax and increase subsidies for public transport.
If you incorporated all of the parties policies into the Wahl-O-Mat, that would all come out in the wash and you'd end up with your preferred party, but also you might abandon the process because it's taking too long.
The challenge is to distil the parties' policies into a reasonable subset that accurately captures the differences between them, some kind of principal component analysis.
> That's obviously not the distinction between the parties here. The second one intends (or at least has a policy to) do something about it, but just not by raising the existing CO2 tax.
Do they, though? I don't know how familiar you are with the German political parties, but the concern about climate change is mostly empty marketing on all sides. We should stop running coal electricity plants, but somehow turning off all nuclear plants immediately is more important. We should stop subsidising driving to work, but that would be regressive etc. Most parties are making noises about climate change being bad, but they're all pretty unwilling to accept any trade-offs involved in doing something about it.
I'm saying if you want something effective do be done, look at what the parties are actually proposing to do, not how concerned they're expressing to be in their election flyers.
Yeah, I generally agree, everyone is in favour of things like "peace" or "health" or (more controversially in the US, but mainstream in Germany) "the environment". The questions shouldn't be about whether you want to improve the environment, but what hard/unpopular choices you are willing to make to achieve that.
So you should give the party in favour of increasing income tax and subsidizing public transport a chance to say that, because it's a hard choice, just a different hard one than increasing the carbon tax.
Something I would like being asked in those election questions is if any party are willing to put in a ban for IC in the energy sector for the same date that they intend to ban IC in the transport sector. A set date where no more fossil fuels is being burned in the energy sector would be a distinct political message to investors and voters, rather than vague concerns about climate change.
Similar, it would be nice if any party would have a date when subsidizes to fossil fuel based power plants will end. There is unlikely that any party is in favor of having those subsidizes, but it seems equally unlikely that anyone is ready yet to be the ones to remove them and face the trade-offs of not paying those plants to keep the engines warm and ready.
> But as a voter who is in favour of a higher CO2 tax, why would you care about that distinction?
You cannot find a party that you agree with 100%. If you have to choose the lesser evil, you may still want to check why exactly a party disagrees with you.
Great point, well made. I’d argue this is the reason for Burkean democracy, that there are too many questions with too many nuances to reduce it to multiple choice. Instead, you elect a person who you think has good judgement and leave them to do all the thinking on your behalf.
But of course this system gets abused, because electors don’t know who they can trust.
What is also important to state is that the parties can vouch the answers to ensure that the match is correct. I cannot vote because I do not have the citizenship but I went through it and was interestingly surprised by the results.
I do agree that it is really a nice conversation starter and can help people who are not sure between one or another.
Wahlomat was a great starting point for me as someone who is not up-to-date on current party agendas. However, its weakness is that it breaks down answers into yes/no options. For me there were lots of items that required more than that (for example: I was looking for parties who reject the premise of a given question - I would have loved a graphical indicator for those cases). But I have to say, drilling down to get that information was not only possible with the website but was easier than hunting for a given stance on a party's website.
The structural problem (or feature) in Germany is that voting for a party who is not expected to pass 5% in total votes is basically the same as not voting at all. For me as a holder of niche opinions, this is inconvenient. Of course, everybody knows this feature exists to prevent the recurrence of a Weimar Republic-style desaster.
I do wish we (Western-style democracies in general) would make more use of direct democratic measures. Barring that, I would absolutely love to give my mandate to several parties in different areas (for example, give my mandate to the Pirate Party on IP matters, but give it to someone else on social policy).
I would always assume that when a single-issue party gets elected, they would push mostly on that issue. Because if someone sympathizes with the Pirates, they do because of the core message, not because of their social policies (which any party is required to answer but some care less)
It's a sensible assumption to make, but unfortunately it doesn't happen that way.
A successful single-issue party that has ill-defined goals in other areas is a ripe target for people pushing other single-issue agendas to insinuate those into the party programme.
In my view this caused the death of the German Pirate Party - the initial impression of "generally centrist, but competent and uncompromising on tachnology/IP/privacy" among the electorate was quickly shifted to "wokesters and economic leftists who are way more extreme than even the Left Party" because the initial members were infiltrated and supplanted by leftist political activists...
But this should be a safe recipe for disaster, shouldn't it? Like the sister comment says, if they don't even bother to advertise on their initial topics anymore, they are for all matters a different party now... so disappointing. I suppose the vote analysis websites should be able to uncover this quickly, otherwise they'd be failing their own goals.
Speaking of the German Pirate Party, I found it interesting that I haven't seen a single election poster about technology or direct democracy this year. The ones I saw were exclusively about the 1.5° climate goal, the gender wage gap, and another social topic that I forgot. Not sure if that's an actual strategy, or just the preferred way to empty their wallets while they have no chance to cross the frustrating 5% firewall anyway.
If they would have continued on their defining issue, maybe the 5% could have been attained, because privacy and security scandals to bank on are a-plenty. Oh well.
A lot of young people starting voting green because they were against upload filters. Then they stayed because the rest of the policy package is solid.
Wahlomat seems like yet another way of trying in to reduce complexities. The explanations given by Die PARTEI nicely highlight to that it might be good to look at the rationale behind the answers.
In general I find the current election campaigns and media coverage rather intellectually offending. I guess it hard to blame the wahlomat for choice topics, that appear throughout the party programs.
One fun fact is that according to a recent study by an economic think tank none of the major party programs if implemented would be enough to reach the Paris climate goals. I highly doubt if any combination or even worse compromise would.
TLDR: That discourse with your friends IS democracy. We need more of it.
Ya. Platforms are just one facet of the full package.
I've participated in politics in the USA. One fascinating part is the endorsement process. My local party is one of remaining orgs that does rigorous endorsements. Fewer orgs do it over time, tracking with the decline of local (political) news and rise in campaign spending (drowning out all other signals).
Some other tenacious orgs still doing endorsement processes are League of Women Voters, Urban League, Municipal League, League of Conservation Voters, NARAL, most unions, Chambers of Commerce, etc. Every org does their own thing; so this inside baseball game is a whole 'nother world of politics.
It's a lot of work, for all involved.
Candidates seeking our endorsement fill out surveys. This is above and beyond their public platform (position) statements. Some of our questions are deal breakers, where candidates have to abide by our bylaws and positions, by design.
Candidates are rarely blank slates. We also research their past voting, activities, where they get their funding, and so forth.
Then we do endorsement interviews. Every one gets the same prepared, canned questions (for fairness).
Every single election cycle, at least one of our interviews makes the local news. So it's clearly impactful.
During our deliberations, we also consider candidate's campaigns and reputations. We have a heavy bias towards people who play ball, gets things done, are effective. In other words, we're not much interested in someone who agrees with us 100%, but is unlikely to attain our policy goals.
we had exactly this issue with a direct democratic CO2 tax plan vote in Switzerland. most of the No's came from young voters that apparently thought it's not going far enough. IMO people who think like this are just as much a part of the problem like those who ignore the issue. When you get to vote for an improvement, even if it's not ideal, you should take it.
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.
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.
It also reinforces the status quo since parties that aren't in parliament yet would not be covered.
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.
Sounds like working as intended - "supporting an idea" is meaningless without expressing priorities and strength - you claim to support some idea but will demonstrably give up on it if it gets you to the ruling majority - if I care about this idea I should not vote for you.
"We support clean energy" - "we had to support opening new coal plants because we wanted to get support on our budget proposal for some agency"... Do I really give a shit they claim to support clean energy ?
You're right, that's why the platform should be able to show all the promises a party has made and how many they also implemented (helped to). That would be decisive for single-issue parties, and still very helpful for major ones - you can see if the delivered anything at all and if yes, on which points. Like, did the Greens deliver anything on their green agenda, or just checked a few points on the social issues: did they deliver on their core points?
I don't think it's quite as clear-cut. MPs are meant to vote according to their conscience, not party lines or coalition agreements.
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.
I think that works extremely well – taken action is relevant while intentions are much less so aren't they?
And building a "coalition" isn't a natural law nor even how things were intended – the house is named "parliament" so there shall be discussion of all voting members prior voting on EVERY SINGLE bill. That's the MPs job description.
A coalition in fact is an illegal voting cartel as since decades each contains the paragraph "there will be no differing votes" while each vote is subject only to the conscience of the MP by definition of the constitution.
But aren't most people disappointed by the social democrats because they don't fight hard enough for their core issues?
Or if they really just bring their core issues through, they seem to be surveillance and not social issues.
If you make a coalition government with the conservatives and you take their program as the coalition program, you did a bad job in forming the coalition.
> If you make a coalition government with the conservatives and you take their program as the coalition program, you did a bad job in forming the coalition.
I like your reasoning. In the end (within reason) I do not care how the laws are implemented, I am voting for the party, which matches what I would like to implement.
That's why I don't understand center-left people not voting left. As if any other party would be willing to implement the program of the social democrats.
I truly believe that the outbreak of socialism within the first four years is baseless fear-mongering.
Have you considered adding references to relevant sections of the party programs on the detailed thesis view?
For example, it might be interesting to see on [1] that the SPD claims to be in favour of the bill they just voted against. This is just one example, but I think an easy way to compare a vote with future claims of the parties would be interesting.
Adding references to relevant sections of the party programs is an interesting idea (especially with your example) to display the discrepancies that sometimes arise between votes and programs.
But that would be a lot of work on top and one would probably have to add a bunch of links for every single vote and claim in the program.
We will focus on what DeinWal does.
Thanks for being here! deinwahl.de generally looks interesting. Some questions for you:
- 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 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?
DeinWal is only one tool and it explicitly excludes stuff like scandals and looks and promises. You don't have to vote according to the result of DeinWal, but you can use it as an additional signal.
> 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?
I disagree. I think the results really reflect the stances of the parties. People on social media who post their results seem to agree with their results no matter whether they are right or left.
But yes, we are limited to the actual votes of the Bundestag and that means that we can not have a question about e.g. education.
Wouldn't have thought though I had the most in common with AfD and Green Party.
Which is no problem, because I roll the dice for my vote since about 30 years.
And neither of them did get my vote.
In political and some other questions I am a supporter of a moderate Rhinehart process.
When the voter is presented with these vote/policy questions, are they ranked in any way, for example, is a climate question 'more valuable' than the autobahn speed.
How is the order of the yes/no/neutral questions decided, for example from serious to less serious? Who decides?
The user of the quiz can skip a question, answer it normally or "like" it with a heart-symbol. Then it is counted twice.
The DeinWal-Team (Martin, Sophie and I) decided the selection, wording and ordering of the questions. We tried to be as neutral and fair as possible. We tried to use only votes where the outcome does not contradict some party values (e.g. because a party thinks a vote "does not go far enough").
The bigger issue is that votes from governing parties and opposition parties are very different things and deinwal.de kinda mixes those together.
As an opposition party you can basically vote what you like, you don't have to consider the consequences (because you often know it won't pass) and you don't have to compromise with a coalition partner.
Having said that: I'm generally not a fan of these tools, precisely because of those issues. Wahl-o-mat has the issue raised by the original poster, i.e. they look at what people announce, not what they do, but the alternative isn't much better, as it's comparing apples and oranges.
> it only looks at what parties claim they will do, not their historical voting record.
In multi part parliametary systems, parties will form governments and small party A has to be prepared to vote against their program or election promise, because that's the concession they had to make to rule in coalition with party B.
Basically all the programs and promises has the form "if we get a majority ourselves and the budget allows then..." but that effectivley never happens. So it's all ambition. Some things can be expressed as promises e.g."we'll never allow X to happen or rule in coalition with Y, we'd rather topple the government and call new elections if that was on the table". If parties fail to live up to that, there is (rightfully) a discussion about broken promises. But otherwise, I think it's rare to see parties say one thing and vote another.
That’s probably less of a problem than you think it is.
Historically it’s more likely than not that promises are kept. (That this isn’t the case is mostly dumb propaganda.) The biggest wrinkle to this is that Germany has coalition governments, so no one party can implement their whole election program.
What is and isn’t done isn’t random, though, and you will find different parties putting a different emphasis one different things. For example, I’m certain that the Greens would drop a great many of their policies on anything except climate if they were elected. However, it’s not as though that emphasis is exactly surprising.
Other than that Wahl-o-Mat is an obviously imperfect tool trying to somewhat simplify something very complex. Which is valuable.
There is a site (deinwal.de) that does what you said and it gave me the exact results. In fact, the wahl-o-mat and other sites merely mirror my own voting behavior. I bet almost nobody other than me actually reads party programs.
I have this simple strategy. I base my decision for who to not vote for based on the behavior of the parties and my decision for who to vote for based on their political program. It's not very surprising that the results were the same.
Parliament work is about making compromises. Between partners and enemies. Between Dreams and Realities. Party Program is vision, voting record is reality after the compromise.
We lost the capability to make and accept compromises.
The only one thing, that is truly additional relevant indicator: Are the parties/parliamentarian transparent and free of corruption/lobbyism.
We also have something like this in my home country, but I don't think it really abstracts away "emotion", nor that it even could in theory. The questionnaires are obviously written by someone, projected through the lens of the respective views and, well, emotions. Also many "hot topics" in politics are by their nature very emotionally loaded. People are emotional creatures and in a lot of situations think more with their heart than their head, and while that quality is often vulnerable to exploitation especially in politics, I don't think trying to deny it does anything good at all.
These tools are rather handy for extracting actual opinions from candidates though, which they usually are pretty successful in hiding among all the PR-esque claptrap that they spew out in speech and writing.
They are funny indeed - using public election funds (meant to give each party a chance) to put up jokes. Whether you think that's right or not, it's hilarious.
I would go so far as to say that not only is that right and hilarious - it is REALLY important for us as a society, although I cannot put into words why I think that way.
PS: Remember to say NO to an Autobahn speed limit of 130 km/h! 131 km/h is the way to go!
For me it's important because they raise interest in politics. It's more obvious in the EU parlament (IMO), but Martin Sonneborn is great in shedding light on what's happening in there.
To be fair, though, in this election, climate change and COVID raised that interest pretty much on their own.
The "hang Nazis" posters are from the previous election [1], while "hang greens" is a new slogan from this cycle [2]. If I had to guess, I'd say that the party was hoping for the "hang greens" posters to be banned so that they could whine about the "hang nazis" posters being unfairly allowed.
Not AfD by the way, but "Der Dritte Weg", a party that I learned about through the Wahl-O-Mat.
Wow, I thought the AfD was the rightmost of the German parties. I wonder if the fascists (not being hyperbolic, Mussolini advertised fascism as a "third way", the others being communism and liberalism) are localized in Westphalia and Bayern or are more widespread. They can't be very popular. Hang the Greens makes me think this is a western thing. Wouldn't they be hanging Die Linke in the east?
Anyway, a Red-Red-Green result would be just as much an insult as some posters. I wish I had money on the SPD, their resurgence seems to have come out nowhere. I was expecting a big rise in Green numbers after the terrible flooding earlier in the year...
Or maybe they want to hang the Greens specifically because they are less popular in Eastern Germany than Die Linke, so that they don't alienate the large number of previous Linke voters. (And on a less strategic level, the subtitle of the poster suggests that it is about hanging green posters everywhere, because green is also the Third Way's party color. That 'pun' wouldn't have worked with other parties.)
I also wonder if parties like The Third Way or the far-left ones aren't partially ops to split the vote on the ends of the spectrum.
>Aktion Dritter Weg/Liberalsoziale innerhalb der Partei Bündnis 90/Die Grünen, vertritt freiwirtschaftliche Ideen und veröffentlicht sie in der Zeitschrift Alternativen (siehe Georg Otto)
Freiwirtschaft is probably the most neutral/centrist "third way" possible. It's neither leaning toward either capitalism nor communism. Rather, the goal is a natural economic order.
From a glance at Wikipedia, it looks like the "third way" has been used by organizations with wildly different ideologies all over the world for at least a century now (and I wouldn't be shocked if it could be traced back at least to the French Revolution). I guess I associate it with Mussolini because he was the first I read use it.
I wasn't familiar with Gesell and the ideas Freiwirtschaft. It actually sounds like a decent (real) third way, a lot like Georgism, and an idea worthy of debating at least.
One of the problems with the Wahl-O-Mat is you are given 38 questions and big Agree/Disagree buttons, so most people just go with their gut-feeling and click through as fast as possible.
E.g. the question "All of the labour force must be covered by the state pension" sounds great but glosses over the whole problem of provisioning that money for future generations (Germany's worker/pensioner ratio is supposed to sink to 1.7 in 2050) and certainly doesn't cover potential alternatives like an Australian Superannutation style system.
A few elections ago in the UK, a site like this got popular, where you'd answer a quiz and it would recommend the party most closely "matched" your preferences. A lot of people ended up getting recommended the green party, despite the fact the party is fairly fringe and has no real voting record. Turns out the site was set up by the Green party. Go figure.
One problem with this sort of thing is that the "who would you rather have a beer with" question is actually vastly important in black swan situations. If you believe that a candidate shares your basic instincts and cultural mores, they're likely to take the choice you would in an unexpected circumstance, like the Covid pandemic, for instance.
That goes back to whether you're electing your drinking buddy that shares the same types of instinct and mores into the top political positions is the appropriate way to approach the whole process.
Democracy only works when we're humble and aware of our own limitations. We need to develop our trust in other people based on their capability as opposed to their personality.
I would argue the average person is terrible at assessing bureaucratic ability but pretty good at assessing personality, so I think they're better off voting with their gut.
> The lesson? There’s no tool, however well designed, that can bring pure reason to politics.
The whole article is just slamming an attempt at improving the situation without suggesting any improvements. It's the typical "Hah! Look! They tried! Idiots!".
Do you think you're going to be able to convince the bricklayer, that just came back home after 8 hours of work and 2 total hours in traffic, to spend several hours reading up on a party's + candidate's history, political stance, ideology, scandals, in-depth interviews, program, and so on an so forth for every party available?
We should be happy that these things at least exist and try to aid people when making these decisions, instead of belittling them (the tools and their makers) and calling the whole thing futile. At least there are attempts to counter (at least a little bit) the deluge of opinions, misquotes, misinformation, faux news, deception and lies, that are spread, facilitated and guided on and by social networks.
The Wahl-O-Mat is also featuring state elections (it used to be only the federal election), and other teams (not government-funded) create similar tools for all kinds of votings: I recently came across a student parliament organizing such a tool for their upcoming elections.
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 answer these questions without extensive research or following the usual news cycle. It comes back to clicking the answers you heard from your favorite party, around the sensational issues they're always discussing.
I don't know why you're downvoted, because you're right.
If you check the detail answers from parties on Wahl-O-Mat, you can often see this:
Party A: "We agree, but only if x"
Party B: "We disagree, because we want Y, which is similar"
And both actually want the same, but with a simple "yes/no" answer, this isn't accurately reflected.
The questions are often dumbed down and you actually do need a lot of background information. With many questions, my answer is "it depends" or "I don't know enough".
But for every question, you can choose 'I don't know'. There is a button for exactly that kind of situation at the bottom, only called 'Next thesis/question'. Then, when you finished, you can still read the answers and think about it.
Wahl-O-Mat isn't there to simply tell who you have to vote. It should make you think, maybe reevaluate your priorities and views but in the end, it's a list of questions where you can compare all parties answers. You just have to ignore the percentage match.
This is why creating these tools is difficult. This formulation shouldn't make it into the tool if you can have two parties agreeing but having opposite answers. The question should be reformulated to allow it.
We must also remember that while the tools obviously won't be the end of the story, they are still helpful. It might mean that I just have to read the party programs and watch interviews with a handful of parties instead of 10 of them.
It should be compared to other alternatives of the same effort (voting the same as your parents, going with a gut feeling, ...).
I actually skipped or voted neutral on several important macro questions because I hadn't made up my mind yet, such as how to deal with national debt. However, I have an opinion on comparatively simple issues such as the use of inclusive language. The result was that tiny culture war parties lead the list in my Wahl-o-Mat results. Technically correct, but not great because this is the process that leads to polarization about fringe issues.
> 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.
Actually, you can just skip the answer. But this is a big fail (or intentional?) of Wahl-o-mat, because the interface is focused on letting the people choose, while hiding the skip-option in plain sight. A similar problem is that they have no explanation given to each question.
I can only assume this is on purpose to let the people answer honestly, even if they just randomly use their gut-feeling.
Why are political parties necessary? Instead of chosing representatives in bulk we should decide democratically about each of these particular questions. Then, a professional executive power (elected independently, or simply hired) would be legally bound to implement these decisions.
On one side, this is not possible on a practical level, because of the sheer amount of work and knowledge which is necessary to answer particular questions on a meaningful level.
On the other side, political parties are a bit what you demand, just on a more abstract level. At least in Germany, we choose them for their specific answers to our questions (or should do it that way), and then hope that they implement them. Though, in reality, politic is complicated and full of compromising and accepting reality. So it's not always possible or good to actually do what the crowd demands.
While it's true that most countries should use more democratic power from their citizen, the unsolved problem is how that can be implemented in a good way which would not harm the country long term. See Brexit for a case where this completely backfired. Or the ending of atomic power in Germany, which now backfires because the country can't stop coal mining.
In my opinion, there are many reasons why representative democracy is a better idea. Just because more direct democracy works in Switzerland doesn't mean it would work elsewhere. Switzerland has a very long tradition of it (among men, women weren't allowed to vote for a long time). It's also a very small country.
The main reasons: First, direct democracy is very vulnerable to populism. Easy slogans that prey on emotions are prone to win against more realistic attitudes. Second, it's very easy to manipulate direct voting. The way you ask can practically determine the outcome. We know that from opinion polls where seemingly very similar questions can lead to totally different results, based on small details or how many choices there are. There are many ways to prevent this in opinion polls, but these would not work in an adversarial political setting. Third, many decisions require expertise that cannot be put into simple questions, and the general public will not have the expertise. In Germany, many members of parliament are surprisingly well qualified in certain areas like tax and defence politics. These are the "backseat" members voted in by party lists, not by direct election. Giving a direction and letting these experts figure out the details later works better than asking for concrete decisions that cannot be later corrected (because they are, as you say, legally binding). If you let people decide about the same issues directly, they will most often not even be able to distinguish between suggestions that are feasible and those that are imaginary. Again, the populist who provides the easy, though entirely imaginary "solution" can easily gain the upper hand. Direct democracy is also more vulnerable to disinformation than representative democracy. This also happens in party programs, of course, but the representative power structure kind of dampens the negative effects from it. Finally, representatives are ideally able to take on political responsibility (and sometimes indeed do), i.e., resign from their post even if a mistake wasn't their personal fault. No corresponding concept of political responsibility exists for the suggested technocrats. Moreover, once a policy decision is made, putting it into place requires a long series of more or less political decisions, too. You cannot just hand over those smaller political decisions to experts.
My 2 cents. Of course, this doesn't preclude discussing how much direct democracy one needs or wants. But I personally completely reject any suggestions for radical direct democracy (which every new radical party invariably makes for a while).
This is a popular fantasy, but I don't think it is true. People today are already voting for parties that increase tax on them and decrease it for others. Many people vote for things that are not directly benefiting them or are even bad for them, both consciously and out of ignorance.
I vote green/left, although they tax me higher, because I think climate change and social justice is more important than whether or not I have 1k per year more or less.
Given the amount of people arguing that the rich "don't pay their fair share" when the rich are the only ones actually paying income taxes, I would say your argument has already been disproven.
I still think the kernel of the idea is a really interesting one. Could you make it work, by, say, ranked-choice voting to allow trading off conflicting priorities? (You wouldn't even need to get people to explicitly rank them, come to think of it - you could just prioritise the more popular 'yes' questions.)
No, OP wants to have people vote on absolutely every decision, whereas the Swiss system is to have elected representatives that deal with the day to day, with the citizens having the power to challenge or propose some specific votes.
In my opinion, the job of politicians is to free me from having to deal with politics. That is why they are called "delegates" (in my country at least), because people delegate that job to them.
Having to consider every minor political issue would be the opposite of what I want.
I agree that maybe some middle ground could be better, though. The parties are too coarse grained, there is no party I agree with on all points. I suppose others feel the same.
It doesn't really say how common they are in each of these country, and I'd be curious to see that.
From my very limited perception, Stemwijzer and Kieskompas in NL are quite popular (for the young-ish, progressive and tech-inclined generation), more so than similar alternatives in Italy. On the other hand, it seems that in NL there's more openness to vote for a different party at every election - while in Italy the electorate seems more polarized and rigid (in Italy the electoral system is not fully proportional, this has surely a great impact in this).
I wonder if the usage of these apps reflects these dynamics .
Here it goes, all are phrased as statements, to which you can agree, be neutral or disagree:
1: There should be a general speed limit on all Autobahn roads.
2: Germany should increase its defense budget.
3: Young adults at the age of 16 should be allowed to vote
in federal elections. [current age is 18]
4: Subsidies for wind power turbines should be stopped.
5: Stronger legal limitations for the abilities of landlords to raise the rents.
6: Covid-19 vaccines should stay protected by patents.
7: The planned end date of 2038 for coal power plants should be moved to an earlier date.
8: All working people should have to join the federal pension funds.
9: The right for recognized refugees to have their families following them should be removed.
10: There should be a national tax for revenue resulting from digital services.
11: The traditional family consisting of a farther, mother and children should be stronger supported than other forms
of families.
12: Donations from companies to parties should be continued to be allowed.
13: Students should get financial support independant of the income of their parents.
14: It should be generally allowed to have a second nationality besides the German one.
15: Federal administrations should be gender-neutral in all published writings.
16: The North-Stream-2 pipeline transporting gas from Russia to Germany should put into use as planned.
17: The solidaric tax should be completely abolished.
18: It should be generally allowed to wear a head scarf for all federal employees during their duty.
19: Buying of new cars with combustion engines should be allowed into the far future.
20: The federal government should have more authority about school politics.
21: The federal government should support more projects to fight antisemitism.
22: Chinese companies should not get contracts for expanding the communication infrastructure in Germany.
23: The state should continue to collect taxes for religious organizations.
24: The controlled sale of Cannabis should be allowed generally.
25: Germany should exit the EU.
26: The candidate lists of the parties should be equally filled with women and men.
27: Hospitals should continue to be paid a fixed fee per case.
28: There should be a tax for large properties.
29: It should be allowed to use face recognition software on video surveillance feeds of public places.
30: Married couples without children should continue to get tax exceptions [like those with children]
31: Biological agriculture should be getting stronger support than conventional.
32: Islamic organizations should be recognized as religious organizations by the federal state.
33: The taxes on CO2 for heating and driving should raise quicker than planned.
34: The constitutional limit on public debt should be unchanged.
35: Asylum should be continued to be granted only for political prosecuted.
36: The minimum wage should be raised to 12€ in 2022.
37: There should be higher taxes on air travel.
38: Companies should decide on their own whether they want to allow home office.
Some where quite difficult to translate to keep the tone, and a lot might require some more background to understand. I have tried my best to be faithful, overall I would say they are phrased very neutral, though with a lot of statements it is immediately obvious, from which party line they would come from.
First - thank you for the effort and upvote to you :-)
Now... more than a couple of these questions can be given the same answers from completely different perspectives. For example:
> 34: The constitutional limit on public debt should be unchanged
You can agree because you think the limit should be increased, decreased, abolished, or set to 0.
> 36: The minimum wage should be raised to 12€ in 2022.
You may disagree because you think it should be raised more; or raised less; or lowered. Or raised to the same amount, but this year.
> 25: Germany should exit the EU.
You may agree because you think Germany should split up into independent regional states; or because you feel the EU is an anti-democratic mechanism; etc.
How would that work? Let's say the ruling party proposes a law that perfectly matches one of their promise, this law is rejected in the parliament. Then what?
Realistically, all promises are at best "we will try to".
> Studies show that across much of Europe, a strong sense of party identification is waning, and voters are less likely to take their party affiliation as preordained.
Very interesting, seems to be the opposite of what’s happening in the US.
Fascinating. This means that if you knew public opinion well, you could game all your policy papers to put your candidacy on top after the public voted this way.
These tools can be very valuable for people that are not into politics. A friend of mine found out she was much more left wing than she thought after doing one of these tests. A problem I have felt is that people are too focused on the projection and perceived personality of the parties rather than on actual policy.
They have one in Canada and I find them problematic and they systematically lean towards leftist or socialist policies.
"Should we provide more services for XXX?"
"Should we invest more in XXX?"
"Should we pay for all student costs for XXX?"
Is a really common refrain on these questionnaires, and the problem is, we all have an instinct towards 'wanting more stuff' even for the benefit of others.
The entire issue revolves around 'how to pay for' and 'the cost / efficiently' of such things - not whether or not we want them.
Who doesn't want free stuff?
I watched a young woman in Instagram take the Canadian test and her 'political views' boil down to 'all the stuff should be free, we should invest unlimited amounts in the environment, and we should have UBI that's higher than current minimum wage'.
I don't think this is a 'political view' rather, it's a undeveloped opinion based on the 'easy first order instinct' of wanting free stuff because that's what the question was asking.
If they paired every question the cost, such as:
"Free tuition for students, will be paid for by increasing average working years by 4 years, or taxes by 3% over entire working life"
"UBI policy, which will be paid for by 10% tax in increase on all citizens and/or increasing retirement age by 5 years"
"$10/day subsidized child care, paid for by 5% tax increase"
There are also innumerable issues that will be hard to fathom for the general population, like National Defence Procurement, Pension system etc..
I think we should be very careful about how we create these policy guides, they need more thought.
The one thing I will say about Germans is however, they have the 'cost' instinct, without fail it seems as though every political survey shows the 'cost' of something or the other being a primary concern or consideration. I never see that in Canada.
Perhaps we should make it normative that every political program announcement has to be accompanied by the cost estimation and payment mechanism.
"The Wahl-O-Mat is organized by Germany’s Federal Agency for Civic Education, which describes itself as a “federal public authority providing citizenship education.” Despite the somewhat Orwellian language, the agency is widely trusted in Germany"
It is a very left wing institution, unfortunately. So it is only "widely trusted" in the sense that the majority of people still seems to be left-leaning.
I'm not a huge fan of the Wahl-O-Mat, because I feel the way the questions are phrased is often misleading or too simplified. Maybe it is better than nothing, though.
I find it amusing how quick stereotypisation happens. Many people instantly know how to categorize someone as right or left after hearing only one argument about certain topics like migration or environmental topics or EU. We need to leave these stereotypical thinking patterns and hear all sides. Without instantly classifying someone as left or right where after the classification parties stop even arguing amymore because they think they know what the opponent is going to say anyway.
From the perspective of Germany, the only arguments for leaving the EU are about nationalism or immigrants. Both of those have strong far-right tendencies, even if they are not exclusively far-right (which nobody claimed anyways).
Neither the article nor the Wahl-o-Mat claim it would be far right ideology. The theses are to some extent chosen in a way to differentiate parties from another, not ideologies. This one just happens to work well for detecting/separating far right parties.
In Sweden and Norway we have had parties that want to leave EU on both side of the political spectrum.
The EU question has many aspects to it, in particular when it comes to fees, democratic control over laws, and voting rights. You need strong incentives to keep smaller countries that pay way more than they get back and which voting impact is dwarfed by larger countries. An argument I see in both countries is to simply force EU to lower the EU membership fee by putting down an ultimatum.
Norways has a special deal with EU. One interpretation (might be unfair) is that they basically have all the responsibilities of an EU member but without voting rights. They do also pay some fees, through I think it is much smaller in total.
In return they are part of the European Economic Area, which include most aspects of free movement and following of EU regulations.
That's not what I'm getting at at all in this case. The left in Europe tends to be highly critical of the EU, and advocates either reforming the EU radically to make it more democratic or, if that isn't possible, leaving it. This is often referred to as "soft Euroscepticism".
The Labour party in Britain was complicit in Brexit, otherwise it wouldn’t have happened. It is one of the only two mainstream parties that can realistically win an election. During the Brexit referendum and afterwards it was lead by someone from the left of the party who required the support of the far left to maintain his position. This resulted in the Labour party having a very unclear position on Brexit which lead thier older supporters to make up thier minds based on Facebook propaganda targeted by Cambridge Analytica who were contracted to the far right.
Yes, the Labour party is quite clueless in this regard, and also Corbyn probably genuinely did not like the EU. I don't think any of the remaining big left European parties are as naive as this.
Yeah, that's how I would frame it as well. It's the populist right and the hard left who are the bulk of the leavers. Centre-left, centre-right and small-el liberals tend to range between somewhat and very pro-eu.
The problem with Wahl-O-Mat is that only questions are displayed for which all parties provided an answer.
Let's say there's a right-wing party wanting to deport all foreigners. But they want a tempo limit, want to invest in wind energy, etc... In the end you could end up with a lot of (false!) agreement.
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 ideas but I thought he was completely ineffective as a political leader, and that he would never have gained the capital to get his own policies through. I was glad to see him gone.
Germany utilizes a proportionate parliamentary system and the level of consensus building is supposed to happen at the party level. People express their party preferences, and coalitions are going to produce governments that can legislate. The German chancellor does not tower over policy. You're primarily voting for a party, not a person. Even more so in Scandinavia, where minority governments are common.
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.
> You're primarily voting for a party, not a person.
It's the same in the UK and in both cases the party leader is in charge.
One key difference is that the UK's political landscape is bi-partite so coalitions are usually not needed.
The voting system in the UK is also designed to produce a clear majority in Parliament in order to allow for a stable and effective government (by 'effective' I am able to implement its policies, i.e. to legislate).
Such a tool can give only a guide to which parties might represent your ideas best. I ran through it, it went into the direction I am deciding to, but not very precisely. That is already the case because the questions can capture your intents only coarsely.
For your actual decision, a lot of other aspects should play a role. In general, the party should have more weight than the individual candidate, but only so much. And especially, in Germany the government will consist of a coalition of at least 2 parties, probably 3 this year. While I do think that on the first order of approximation you should elect the party which represents you best, sometimes strategic considerations can play a role too.
It's really odd: In the previous election, you couldn't see/hear one news report about the election without mentioning the Wahl-O-Mat. This election-time it was some internet meme that reminded me it existed.
After usage of it, it becomes apparent as to why it gets zero coverage: Almost everyone I've asked (migrant/unemployed/self-employed/postal-worker/cooks/farmer/cab-driver/...) experienced a stark surprise.
The parties they came out with, did not match at all with what is presented to them as a "good choice" by the media.
Some of my migrant friends joked that I should label them a right-winger now.
I'm not sure whether they will base their election on the Wahl-O-Mat experience alone. But it does show a huge difference in the agenda-setting of our media vs. the needs of individuals.
> Some of my migrant friends joked that I should label them a right-winger now.
I don't see how that's odd. Many migrants come from more conservative (in the Western sense) cultures. They can align with the progressive parties because they're afraid of the conservative ones due to their anti-immigrant stances, but that doesn't mean they are progressive.
Oh, definitely, I have no doubt about that. There's a lot of immigrants who like immigrating is hard because they think it keeps out the chaff, so to speak. As an Indian, I've seen this in many in my own circle who've emigrated or spent significant time abroad.
> I don't see how that's odd. Many migrants come from more conservative (in the Western sense) cultures. They can align with the progressive parties because they're afraid of the conservative ones due to their anti-immigrant stances, but that doesn't mean they are progressive.
Yeah, I used to point out that Islam as practiced by a significant number of Muslims is further to the right than Trump supporters.
You do get downvoted for pointing that out,though.
I got my parties of choice on all tools I have used. The fact that I always got the same results made me bored of these tools. Maybe tell people to actually read the party programs before doing the Wahl-O-Mat?
Also, don't forget to actually activate all parties. Selecting 5 right wing parties and then being surprised that you don't vote for them is stupid.
The funny thing i observed is: Especially immigrants from (former) communist countries (at least in my peer group) are tending more towards AfD instead of more left leaning parties.
My wife, originating out of Vietnam has studied in germany, has now full citizenship and is working here would rather vote for the AfD then anything left of the CDU. Why? Because the memory of $left_leaning_party = communism = bad living circumstances are too deep engrainend in her mind.
Wahlomat is really great for 2 things though: First there are a lot of small parties, and while some of them probably deserve a seat at the table, it would be too much work to read all their programs. Wahlomat gives me the ability to presort some of the smaller parties, read their answers, and then maybe dig into their programs if I found that interesting.
The other thing is that Wahlomat is a great discussion starter. A few friends and I first did it all by ourselves, then went through our answers together. My opinion was shifted on a couple of these questions, shifting my overall position a bit, too.