Saturday, 3 April 2010

Is VoteMatch biased?

eeeh,that Iain Dale, he had a blogpost about a site called VoteMatch, you answers yer questions and it tells you who you should vote for. That Iain Dale reckons its a bit biased.
I have taken their test five times now. Four out of the five times I came out decidedly UKIP. It was only when I took it and pretended to be David Cameron that I came out majority Conservative. Even then it was touch and go. I wonder if other Conservatives have found the same.

If you go through the questions, of course there are overlaps between parties, but it seems to be that some answers may have been incorrectly weighted. Even when I answered the test giving what I would call "mainstream Conservative" answers, I still come out as marginally UKIP.
I reckoned it was a bit bias too, me and the missus are at different ends of the political spectrum, but we ended up with similar results. So I gets onto Twitter and mouthed off about it, and a few moments later I get a response from @VoteMatch.

They suggested I searched Twitter to see what other people were reporting. So I did and I made me a pie chart of the last fews day's worth of people who took the test and then posted on Twitter.

Looks like its not particularly biased towards UKIP, if anything it would be biased towards the Lib Dems, or possibly there are more Lib Dems on Twitter than in real life.

I get Iain Dale's thing about conservative space being more weighted towards UKIP than the Conservatives. But on the other hand, they did mighty well in the last EU elections, maybe it is that sort of proportion this time round too.

You see on VoteMatch, you get to chose which parties you're likely to consider voting and which you aren't, which is why hardly anyone reports that VoteMatch suggested the BNP or Labour, cos very few people who are one Twitter would consider voting for those parties, but most Tories would at least consider UKIP.

**UPDATRE**
Days pass, its Monday now, and I'm still checking twitter for updates about VoteMatch and building up a pie chart using Google's graphs API.

I know, ts crazy, Labour are in fourth place.

However there are entertaining grumbles on Twitter,


rather neatly slapped down by @VoteMatch themselves.


So is there a neat way of quantifying how reliable each party is at following up its own manifesto policies and pledges? Or just messy ways that involve wading through dozens of parliamentary votes?

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