Sunday, October 03, 2010

How does ignorance affect your voting habits?

Yesterday I was playing with a British website from their last election called Vote For Policies. It shows you different parties' platforms on different issues without telling you which platform belongs to which party. You pick your favourite platform for each issue, and then at the end it tells you which parties you've picked. Brilliant idea! I want someone to make something like that for Canada (and ideally for the upcoming Toronto election!)

But what was most interesting about this for me is the effect of my own ignorance on the platforms I chose. I don't know a whole lot about UK politics. The site provided six different platforms, but I could only name four UK political parties going in. I'm certainly not familiar enough with the parties to recognize from their language which platform belongs to whom. (I could sometimes recognize from language choices whether a particular statement was left-wing or right-wing, and I could see some patterns as I went through the quiz, so after I while I could say "This statement I'm reading now was made by the same party that I chose for the last issue", but I couldn't determine that a particular statement originated from the Labour party or whatever.) I'm also rather ignorant of the specific details of political issues in the UK. I couldn't even tell what apparent problem some platform items were meant to address, like at all.

But, at the same time, I'm not 100% ignorant. The UK political system is analogous to ours. (The parties even have the decency to use the same colours!) I can read words and understand things, and many issues are generally universal - money is finite, the economy's a shambles, people need health care, people need jobs, Kids Today are a disgrace. I'm sure I could convince a British person that I'm about as informed as the average citizen if I really had to. (This wouldn't be true, but I could convince someone, especially if they themselves believe that they're more informed than the average citizen.)

So here's where it gets interesting. My results were absolutely linear: the more ignorant I was about an issue, the more right-wing a platform I chose; the more informed I was about an issue, the more left-wing a platform I chose. Absolutely linear, no exceptions, no outliers. It's not the parties I picked that's so interesting, it's how my ignorance affected my choices! This is very informative and incredibly helpful to be aware of.

If you're about as ignorant as me of UK politics, I highly recommend taking the quiz yourself and seeing if any patterns emerge. I find it extremely valuable to know how my own ignorance affects my choices. Maybe you will too.

16 comments:

laura k said...

the more ignorant I was about an issue, the more right-wing a platform I chose; the more informed I was about an issue, the more left-wing a platform I chose.

That is both a beautiful and a scary statement. It's why we on the left are always trying to educate, educate, educate. And why they on the right obfuscate, relying on myth, slogan and innuendo, but obscuring or lying about facts.

I'll take the quiz first chance I get.

allan said...

I am totally ignorant about most of this, but selected everything and took it anyway:

Green Party (6 of 9)

laura k said...

Help! I took the quiz, but it won't show me the results w/o a valid UK postal code! How did you two get around this?

impudent strumpet said...

W11 1BB is a valid UK postal code.

laura k said...

OK, I found a fake postal code online.

I scored 89.99% Green Party.

On one question - the one I knew least about - I picked Conservative Party.

I took notes while I was taking the quiz, so I would remember which issues I knew least about. My notes indicate: "No idea what the issues around NHS are. Blind guess here."

That equaled Conservative.

All else Green!

I'm a bit surprised it was Green and not Socialist. I'm going to look into that.

impudent strumpet said...

Here's where the parties fall on the political compass.

laura k said...

...And that is probably because the Liberal Democrats and Labour parties have moved so much further to the right, as I heard at the Marxism conference this year.

laura k said...

Thanks for posting the political compass link. That's where I live, in the lower left quadrant.

So how did you two get around the postal code requirement?

laura k said...

Never mind, I'm behind... I see your answer now.

impudent strumpet said...

I am totally ignorant about most of this, but selected everything and took it anyway:

Green Party (6 of 9)


Did the ones for which you didn't choose Green in any way correlate with greater or lesser ignorance?

Mine were mostly Green, and the remainder proceeded directly through LibDem, Labour, and Conservative in ascending order of ignorance.

laura k said...

In the UK, there is something much farther to the right than Conservative: BNP. Fascist. No matter how ignorant we are of any issue, they're policies are pretty transparent.

In general, I found the policy choices re immigration very sad, likely reflecting public scapegoating.

laura k said...

** their ** policies

Changed the sentence but not the they're/their choice.

impudent strumpet said...

Yeah, I've encountered some BNP people on twitter. It's...quite the phenomenon. But for the purpose of this quiz all their policies parsed as irrelevant to any vision of humanity I might possibly have, so the fact that they didn't show up in my summary isn't noteworthy.

allan said...

Green:
crime, economy, education, environment, immigration and welfare

UKIP:
democracy (liked proportional representation and the referendum thing; clearly missed the monarchy crap)

health-nhs (several things seemed good (free eye and dental checkups), but most platforms had a few good things in them, so i probably just picked one)

BNP:
Europe (i was totally in the dark here, but the using of EU fees for infrastructure and fighting poverty and unemployment sounded good)

also was at work and did not realize there was so much reading. i probably went through the thing too fast.

this now feels like a quiz i got maybe a B on.

allan said...

i looked up shopping websites and i think i picked a book store address somewhere.

laura k said...

Allan picked BNP for something. How scared should I be?

I was in the dark on the Europe issues, too.