Vote Compass is online application that offers citizens a personalized, informative (and, I daresay, fun) entry point into the policy platforms of the parties vying for election. Answer a series of questions about your views on Ontario politics, and the application calculates your alignment with each of the parties running for election.
The Vote Compass questions are crafted by the team of political and data scientists at Vox Pop Labs, the makers of Vote Compass, in collaboration with a team of academics from local (in this case, Ontario) universities. They reflect salient topics in the electoral discourse and try to get at key points of differentiation between the party platforms.
Each of the parties included in Vote Compass is consulted through the calibration process. So, the parties can have a say in how they're represented in Vote Compass. But whether a party leader's personal views differ from the party line—that I can't say as we haven't yet had the fortune of having a party leader reveal their results (although I'm sure some have taken Vote Compass for themselves).
The parties are positioned on each of the questions included in Vote Compass on the basis of their public disclosures on the issue to date—from public statements, press releases, media interviews, etc. The parties are also given the questions in advance and the opportunity to clarify their positions if they so please. As new information is released that relates to any of the subjects covered in Vote Compass, we update the calibrations accordingly.
(I should note as well that users can see every calibration for every party, plus the public disclosures that substantiate those calibrations, in Vote Compass.)
Probably "does Vote Compass tell me how to vote?" It's actually not intended to direct people on how to vote, but rather to help them explore the political landscape and their place within it. It's largely about the policies being proposed by the parties—and there are other considerations that go into vote choice (party identification, attitudes towards the leaders, etc.). Vote Compass doesn't capture all of those considerations, nor is it meant to.
So we're not advising people as to how they should vote or predicting how they would vote, but rather trying to help people navigate the policy landscape.
We have built Vote Compass and Vote Compass-esque for municipal elections and other political events such as referenda. The issue is that the initiative isn't that scalable as yet. It takes a lot of work in terms of research and analysis to build these applications, so we're limited in how many we can take on at a given time as we're a small team.
But we'd love to do as many Vote Compasses (Compii?) as possible.
It's certainly interesting to see how the parties are plotted in Vote Compass, as it changes from election to election. The clustering of the Liberals, NDP, and Greens in one quadrant is, to my mind, a telling illustrating of how political competition operates in this province.
The calculus the Vote Compass uses to align both users and parties isn't weighted to the number of questions on a particular issue. We train a model using pilot data to calibrate the dimensions in the application, and users have the ability to select their own weights in the results section if they care about certain issues more than others.
Again, more on those methods in the links I've included.
For greater clarity, you can add or remove questions from the Vote Compass survey without the plots on the 2D grid changing substantially, so long as the parties are accurately coded. The purpose of using this measure is specifically to overcome the selection effects that might occur based on question selection.
The determination of the number of questions is actually informed by user experience rather than our methodology. We've found that 30 items seems to be the optimal point for retaining users. We field pilot surveys in advance of launching Vote Compass to determine which questions resonate most among Ontarians. That's how the final set is selected.
There are additional criteria that warrant mentioning, such as whether we're able to accurately calibrate parties on a given question.
That's a good point and one always wants to be cognizant of the potential for order bias or priming. The items in Vote Compass are actually randomly served so that we're able to detect if there is any significant effect based on ordering. We do the same thing in the pilot studies. To date we have not found any significant ordering effects among the final set of questions included in Vote Compass.
The first question is really about the nature and structure of political competition in Ontario. With respect to the second question, you can actually review your responses vis-à-vis each of the parties in the results section of Vote Compass. So you can see where you are more or less progressive/conservative than each of the parties.
The fact of the matter is that most smaller parties do not have sufficiently developed platforms for us to calibrate them on all the questions included in Vote Compass. So we could not offer a viable or reliable estimation as to how they're situated in the political landscape.
It varies. People are very actively engaged in politics are often less surprised by their results than people who are less engaged. But we receive quite a bit of feedback from politicos and non-politicos alike telling us that they've been surprised by their results—but that, when digging into the reasons for their results, learned a lot about where the parties stand on key issues.
Vox Pop Labs takes on government-sponsored initiatives all over the world, for governments comprised of various ideological makeups. We are happy to promote civic engagement and democratic participation regardless of which party is in power.
There's actually very little empirical evidence to support the idea that Vote Compass exclusively determines vote choice. In fact, the evidence is to the contrary based on data from the Canadian Election Study. So, while we hope that Vote Compass is informative, we're confident that it's not determinative.
It's difficult to unpack this without knowing your full slate of responses, but have a look at how the Ontario PCs are positioned on each of those issues to get a better sense as to why you're aligned the way you are.
It's a good question and admittedly made our lives more difficult given that we weren't certain which aspects of the People's Guarantee would make their way into Doug Ford's platform. We've had to rely on the public disclosures that Mr. Ford has made and statements by the PC Party since his leadership was announced. Again, the PC Party has had the opportunity to review all of their calibrations in advance and we have not received any indication that they disagree with how they're represented.
So, this is a good example of how the weighting options in Vote Compass can come in handy. If you're a single-issue voter, or you ascribe more salience to some issues than to others, you can weight your results in Vote Compass by the issues you care about the most.
I've been told, anecdotally, that people have used Vote Compass to screen potential dates.
So how does that work? Ha!
I suppose they want to see if they're a relatively close ideological fit to avoid disappointment.
My pleasure. Thanks Haydn!
Vote Compass is online application that offers citizens a personalized, informative (and, I daresay, fun) entry point into the policy platforms of the parties vying for election. Answer a series of questions about your views on Ontario politics, and the application calculates your alignment with each of the parties running for election.
Notice how bunched up the Liberals, NDP and Green are on the compass, with the PCs waaay over in the bottom right (more socially and economically conservative by a huge margin). The compass quite accurately plunked me into the tiny space exactly halfway between the Libs and NDP, which somehow makes me a Green voter? About 60% of the residents of this province likely reside quite close to me in that small l/small c liberal/conservative spectrum. But this year, maybe it's our once every 25 years to hand the reins to the 40% and see what gets broken? This is why we can't have nice things. Kinda makes me miss Patrick Brown, who seemed to be promising not to break everything.
