I feel like Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City. Except I’m not tapping away at a shiny Mac (it’s a Dell). I’m not female (male). And I’m not documenting my hunt for my perfect love (it’s the perfect political party I’m after).
Oh what luck then, that two cyber solutions have been launched to find my perfect euro-match.
First up, EUProfiler. And it’s pretty straightforward, in a long-winded kind of way. Just indicate your views by answering a series of questions - with answers ranging from completely agree to completely disagree. So far, so simple.
You are then provided with some beautiful representations of your voting choices. You can see my results below. My cross has been placed bang in the centre of the circle , but slightly left of centre socio-economically and slightly anti-EU integration. Not an unfair representation. (But then these nifty tools are like those things you fill in at school to help you figure out what your future career should be - you tell it what you want to do, and it then presents that information right back at you, albeit worded slightly differently.)
However, EUProfiler then delivers the crushing news. My top party is …. the BNP.
Admittedly, there’s not much in it (see below), but still! I have actually had to stop myself writing about the BNP too much on Th!nk About It, but I certainly haven’t been singing the fascists’ praises.
VoteMatch seems to work just slightly differently…..
It compares your political preferences with questions and statements taken from election documents of political parties contesting the elections. You can give your views on these statements by clicking on ‘agree’, ‘disagree’, ‘neutral’ or ‘don’t know’. Statements about which you have no view are not counted in determining your result. After responding to all statements, you can indicate which issues you consider of extra importance. The program will then calculate which party has opinions closest to yours, and rank the other parties in descending order.
I won’t bore you with any more details. Suffice to say that VoteMatch delivered similarly homogeneous results, but this time, telling me which European grouping suits my world-view.
By this time, I’d lost the will to live, let alone vote. If the EU is so unloved by some because it is viewed as a “bureaucracy gone mad” or “how it is to be ruled by experts” - as has been described to me recently - then these “educational tools” probably aren’t going to help matters.
But seeing as we’re all Euro-geeks (or pretty much on the way) - it might just float your boat. Go on, check it out….. You never know, you might discover you’re a white supremacist.
(9 votes, average: 2.78 out of 5)
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:)))), and how did these kind of “tests” influence your career direction? in my case they totally fail :)))) will try one of your links now, so i can test my “political orientation”
I used the tool to place my self politically within EU and Greece,
however the results showed that I belong to another party from the one
I usually vote for.
I think it seems a little bit naïve: in order to help me place myself
politically in Greece for example they asked two simple questions. I
think we need more that 2 questions to roughly understand the
political beliefs of someone.
In any case, I consider this as a good opportunity for young people to
“play with their computers” and perhaps think of the EU politics more.
out of curiosity, did they get your political preferences correctly?