A Political Quiz That's Actually Useful

[rowyn]

I like this quiz! (Thank you, detroitpainter!) It solicits your opinion on various issues and how important each section is. At least on my browser, it was well set-up, so that you can go back through and change various parts of your answers without having to re-take the whole thing.

And if you don't trust the quiz's results, then you can compare the candidates' positions yourself.

But what I really like about it is that it's issue-focused. I've always found it surprisingly hard to find out what candidates stand for (contributing, I'm sure, to my perception that they don't stand for anything.) So it was great to see a site refering to drilling in the ANWR and immigration policies, instead of Dean's post-primary whoop or Bush's flight jacket. :P



Bear in mind the quiz always ranks at least one person at 100% -- that's "your closest match" not "he thinks just like you".

Bush: 100%
Lieberman: 89%
Edwards: 87%
Dean: 83%
Kerry: 82%
Clark: 81%
Sharpton: 71%
Kucinich: 61%

If I play with my issue weightings, I can get the top five selections to within 8 percentage points of each other. It looks like I'm a bit more conservative-leaning than I thought, but overall, it confirms my general suspicion: for my purposes, they're all equally good.

Or equally bad.

I'll probably vote for Michael Badnarik. I don't agree with him on everything, either, but he's on the same side as me on more issues than any of the people listed in the quiz were.

Anyone else know some third-party candidates worth looking at? Or reasons to prefer one of the candidates above? As you can see, my vote is rather teetering. I'm almost one of that rare breed of "fence sitters" you hear so much about. ;)

Comments

Re:

[chipuni.livejournal.com]

I won't deny that Bush is, politically, nearly my polar opposite. (And, yeah -- you and I do disagree on political issues. Thank heavens, natural sciences have a more fair arbiter!)

On the other hand, I consider political quizzes like that one to be the opposite of the 'anything but Bush' philosophy. An 'anyone but Bush' supporter would vote for any candidate that they feel could win the national election, and ignores personal beliefs. This quiz's philosophy is to find the candidate closest to personal beliefs, and ignore which candidate would be most likely to win the national election.

Re:

[rowyn]

Yes, that's what I like about the quiz. It does offer a "political party" weighting, but assuming you don't pick one, it's (theoretically) neutral on viability, party, and personality issues.

I look forward to seeing it after the primaries -- the site says it'll be updated then to include third-party candidates. Should be cool!

Re:

[level-head.livejournal.com]

I agree about the quiz -- I was thinking of it in counterpoint to the actual practice going on in the Democratic primaries.

And I heartily agree about the "fair arbiter" nature of the scientific method. I was arguing with someone last week who was making rather silly assertions about carbon dating -- it was straightforward to show the truth. But this cannot work with UFO believers -- they can always say "well THAT might have been a hoax but my uncle really saw one!"

Politics is somewhere in between -- but still contentious. I try to approach it as I do the science topics -- and in so doing, I have learned that a lot of what everybody knows about the world situation ranges from badly distorted to utterly wrong.

Whether abortion is "wrong", to pick a topic, is not something that can be proven scientifically. But what, say, John Kerry said in 1997 in support of the unilateral removal of Saddam Hussein can be.

And the predicted range of effects of the Kyoto protocol is an issue of fact. The predictions might not ultimately turn out, but it is a fact that they made certain predictions.

I do spend more time with science than politics; it just happens that in trying to preserve the teaching of science in science classes, politics is a necessary component of the process.

===|==============/ Level Head