The case for voting for policies
A fine-grained understanding of people’s views on the issues of the day — separate from party politics — is provocative. This is a repost on Medium of a note from 2016.
I am a big fan of Vote for Policies.
If you haven’t seen it, it’s a non-profit that, for recent general elections, allowed you to see policies from the party manifestos, side by side, organised by category — education, crime, and so on. The text is only slightly edited where it would otherwise be obvious which party it was from. You go through each category and choose the policy you like best. At the end, it reveals which party you picked in each case.
There are many quizzes that purport to do something similar; I think using the actual manifestos is better.
The results are intriguing. The following summary maps were published on VFP’s site, and are entirely their copyright.
The economy
When you fill in the survey you are asked for your postcode, so your results can be tied to a parliamentary constituency. For the 2015 general election, here is a map showing the winning parties, by constituency, in the category of the economy:
This looks pretty plausible, doesn’t it? In England, it’s a mixture of red (Labour) and blue (Conservative), with the blue perhaps a bit ahead. In Wales, the green is the Green Party. In Scotland, the green is the Scottish Green Party and the black is the SNP.
I said it was intriguing, though.
Foreign policy
Here is the same map, this time for the category of foreign policy:
Blue and the two shades of green mean the same as the previous map. Yellow is the liberal democrats. Purple is the UK Independence Party (UKIP), the only party whose raison d’être is to leave the EU. And bear in mind that this is an opt-in survey with, probably, a left-leaning, liberal, technocractic bias.
I wonder whether David Cameron would have been so keen to call a referendum if he had seen this.
The one that struck me even more was this one:
Education
For England and Wales, at least, it looks like Liberal Democrats (yellow) had their finger on the pulse. Of course, thanks to the electoral system, they almost disappeared from Parliament.
What a shame we couldn’t have voted to have the Liberal Democrats’ policies for education.
