Tuesday 5 April 2016

Election guidance from your mobile

The Wales Governance Centre has announced an app which aims to help voters make up their minds. Professor of Political Science Roger Scully writes:

This is an online application that enables voters to compare their views with the policy positions of the main political parties that are competing in the 2016 Welsh Assembly elections. WalesVote16 provides a number of results based on different methods of calculating how well the users and the political parties match. [...] WalesVote16.com is not designed to tell citizens how they should vote; only to allow them to see where they stand compared to the main parties across a range of policy issues.

The project has been developed with some colleagues in Switzerland who are experienced in putting together these sorts of Apps, and developed in parallel with similar ones for Scotland and Northern Ireland.

My only concern is about possible bias. Although Professor Scully asserts that WalesVote16.com is a strictly academic project and is not affiliated with any political party or movement, unconscious prejudice is unavoidable and I would like to be assured that the "team of political scientists" represents a range of political philosophies. Otherwise this and other apps in the pipeline look like a useful contribution to voter participation in the upcoming election.



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