European voting

[undyingking]

You probably know by now that I'm a sucker for this sort of toy. It's a quiz that matches your opinions with those of the parties standing in the European elections, but the fun apect is that it will tell you not just about your own country but also about parties in other countries. So I can see for example that my own closest opinion matches are the German Greens, the French Socialists and Plaid Cymru. Not much use to me here, unfortunately.

It's also interesting to see that the pro- / anti-EU spectrum bears, on a Europe-wide scale, very little relationship to the left- / right-wing spread. There are socialist parties, conservative parties and green parties, ranging from fiercely pro-EU to vehemently anti-. Social-democratic parties are generally pro-EU, as are liberal parties of left and right, and self-defining anti-EU parties are generally right-wing, but that's about it.

And, either amusingly or depressingly depending on your point of view, it analyses the Labour policy platform as currently being well to the right of the Tories. There you go.

Comments

[mr-malk.livejournal.com]

"it analyses the Labour policy platform as currently being well to the right of the Tories"

Indeed. New Labour: Tough on Civil Liberties; Tough on the Causes of Civil Liberties!

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I think, though, that the authoritarian / libertarian axis is better expressed as being orthogonal to the left- / right-wing axis. As seen on Political Compass and so on.

(But htat would make this EU profile one 3D, which might be hard to render clearly!)

[mr-malk.livejournal.com]

I couldn't agree more, and thanks for the link, that's a really interesting site (My results for that test put me within hand-shaking distance of Nelson Mandela, and frankly, I can think of worse company to keep)!

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

This newish page is particularly interesting in the current context, I think.

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

True, but it really, really would have been worth it.

The late and still much-missed Chris Lightfoot did his own survey - grief, was it six years ago? - in which he asked for opinions on a load of maters, correlated them against each other and deduced two axes that might be more useful than the traditional ones in most 2-D models.

It was a fascinating study and probably worthy of repeating every few (3+?) years, possibly with a wider audience still than the first iteration got.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Mm, I remember that now you say. I'm surprised someone hasn't picked it up.