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Alternative way to find your political identity

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carlsson

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Joined
Jul 30, 2003
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Location
Västerås, Sweden
I thought I had seen everything in ways to form a political opinion, but this is something new. An opinion poll company has put together a set of random questions which they have asked people in combination of asking their political views. Then they anonymized the answers and sorted them to get results like this:

Someone who votes on political party X typically often goes to the cinema, seldom has friends for dinner, is doing a lot of Internet shopping, has been abroad twice last year but never goes jogging.

Someone who votes on party Z ... etc with the most common traits from the opinion poll.

Then they have devised an Internet poll for everyone to take, where the answers on each of these questions will be weighted compared to the typical voter, so in the end you get percentages of the most likely parties you belong to, based on your interests and lifestyle.

It more or less is a ploy. I took the test, and based on the results, I should vote in the complete opposite political direction than my views reside in. One might say I don't live the life I should, but to me a test based on what you think about particular political questions has more relevance than one based on how often you bake your own bread or how much money you spend yearly on underwear! It makes me wonder more which group of voters buys new underwear every week and who use their old rags until they fall into shreds.
 
The mining had already taken place, as far as I'm concerned. Now they were utilizing the results.

Four days to election day. This has been one of the most intensive campaigns so far. Rumour spreading, hacking onto intranets, bomb threats, infinite repeated backfiring opposition arguments, more rumours, accusations, more computer crime, blaming eachother and yet more focusing on the negative effects if the opposition wins the election than the positive effects if our own party wins. The opinion polls suggest it will be a very tight election, but these polls tend to have quite a big error margin. In particular left party voters tend not to express their symphaties in the poll, but wait to the real election.
 
carlsson said:
The opinion polls suggest it will be a very tight election,
Click to expand...
Ayep. With only a few thousand (?) postal votes left to check, the final standings are right wing 48.1% (four parties combined) - left wing 46.2% (three parties combined), leaving 5.7% for various microscopic parties that won't count in the end. And so we have a change of government after twelve years of social democrats. There was a significant number of foreign journalists reporting from the election, as they smelled a change of government and when a party has to give up the power after a relatively long period, it is a big thing.
 
Looks like I'm Social Libertarian/Authoritarian

Wee!

They way I gripe about stuff, this shouldn't really be a suprise.....

-VK
 
I used to be a good Republican, always voted the party ticket. I'm finding as I get older that the Republican party has turned away from their original platform (as I saw it), and have started to follow the ways of the "moral majority" too closely.

I'm a firm believer in the separation of Church and State, and I don't want Jerry Falwell telling me how to live my life.

At the 2004 presidential elections I did something I thought I would never do: I voted Democrat. Fat lot of good it did ;-) I'm probably going to vote Democrat again in the 2008 elections. I think "Dubya" has done irreparable harm to this country, and I think it's time to get him and his ilk out of office.
 
I wound up in the Libertarian/Left quadrant, somewhat to the left of, and much more Libertarian than Ghandi. (These tests never get it correct anyways...I'm actually a wild-eyed, pistol-waving anarchist!)

--T
 
I'm also in the Ghandi headquarters, a bit to the right (more centered) than him. (Economic Left/Right -5.38, Social Libertarian/Authoritarian -3.23)

The important question is how often Mahatma Ghandi bought new underwear or went to the cinema. :)
 
BTW: Igor Stravinsky is quoted to in his day have enthusiastically embraced facism. Yet he is dotted at approximate same position as George W. Bush on the other graph... Tony Blair is said to be on par with Joseph Haydn.
 
carlsson said:
BTW: Igor Stravinsky is quoted to in his day have enthusiastically embraced facism. Yet he is dotted at approximate same position as George W. Bush on the other graph...
Click to expand...

Personally I was much more surprised about Stravinsky!

Me- I'm sitting atop mr Ghandi.
 
By the way, I wonder how many countries have a voting system that will make it possible for a party that officially didn't participate to not only get votes, but also take a seat in the local (town) constitution. It happens here right now. In about 20 cities across the country, one or more parties that didn't have local candidates and thus not planned to participate, yet got enough votes to take a seat. In some cities, a voter has added a candidate by hand (it is allowed) while in other places, no candidate at all can be found, which will leave at least one empty seat in the local constitution... for the next four years. Totally bizarre if you ask me. Maybe it is the big drawback of having many political parties and low or no percentage limits on which get a seat.
 
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