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

Details Matter

[telnar.livejournal.com]

One problem with any survey is that it matters why a candidate believes what he does.

For example, I favor drilling in ANWR. I don't consider it a remotely close question based on the level of environmental risk and the potential economic gain (an estimated 10 billion barrels of oil extractable at a $25/bl world price even according to http://www.wri.org/climate/anwr.html which does not favor drilling). Of course, this is in the context of a fairly limited (2000 acres of actual drilling) and environmentally sensitive plan (e.g. attempting to restrict most activities to avoid migration patterns).

Now let's look at some background. States which were more recently admitted to the US have a much higher fraction of federally owned an controlled land than those which were in the country for longer. This reaches an extreme with Alaska which has a sizable majority of federal land. I happen to believe that this whole approach to environmental conservation is wrong and that Alaskans should have far more of a voice than they do in making this decision since they will be most strongly affected by the consequences both good and bad (incidentally, the little I've heard from Alaskan politicians and surveys suggests that they would strongly favor drilling). In some ways, I see the very existence of this as a purely Federal decision as a sign of poor environmental policy.

ANWR has also become a litmus test issue for environmentalists signaling the degree to which politicians regard the environment as more important than economic or other considerations. By that standard, I also favor drilling, and would still favor drilling if the available extraction technology made those 2,000 acres (but no other area) look like they had been hit by a nuclear weapon (don't worry -- the actual process isn't remotely like that and will probably leave those 2,000 acres looking much as they do now: like an uninhabited lunar landscape). Alaska has about 375 million acres of land. Opening 2,000 of them to drilling is not that significant an environmental impact even if we allow for the roads and pipelines which will be build and increased shipping necessary to support the drilling.

None of this is to say that I don't regard protecting the environment as one of the interests which is legitimately a part of development decisions. I'm just very disappointed at the way that cost/benefit analyses are typically done on environmental questions. Just because we happen to be starting from a baseline where Alaska mostly consists of wilderness doesn’t mean that we should automatically prefer that. Perhaps we don’t have enough wilderness on the East Coast, but that doesn’t mean that Alaska’s people might not be better off with less.

A politician could be a strident environmentalist in his general attitude towards the tradeoffs which are appropriate between economic development and environmental protection while still favoring drilling in ANWR (based on my perception of the gains and losses). The fact that I don't know of any such politicians may be a question of this being a litmus test issue. So, litmus tests aside, I'd want to understand his reasoning before I assumed that someone who supported drilling agreed with me.

Re: Details Matter

[rowyn]

I certainly see your point. While it doesn't much matter for that particular issue why they are in agreement with me, a politician isn't going to be making decisions on only a handful of political questions. The "why" will help tell you how they're going to act on other issues. Since far more issues are not addressed than are, the "why" is at least as important as the "what".

Still, it does give me more information about candidate positions, and in a more digestible form, than has filtered down to me by any other means so far. I really liked Badarnik's "issues" page for his more detailed breakdown. hmm. Now I'm wondering if the other candidates have similar pages and I just haven't found them. It seems like I looked once before and wasn't happy with the information I could locate, but I haven't tried recently.