The biggest problem with Wahl-O-Mat in my view is that it only looks at what parties claim they will do, not their historical voting record. There had been some discussion around this topic this election cycle, so perhaps they will try to address it in future iterations.
The site deinwal.de tries to address this by letting you vote on past bills and then showing you who votes most similar to you.
However, for opposition parties this doesn't work reliably since they'll sometimes vote against something if it doesn't go far enough or if they disagree with the implementation details, even if they agree with the general idea. Unless you read up on the vote, these nuances will be missed.
It also reinforces the status quo since parties that aren't in parliament yet would not be covered.
This doesn't even work that well for the governing parties. Coalition governments are based on the parties making compromises where their positions disagree. This means that in particular the smaller partner(s) have to vote against their own program most of the time if they want to at least get their core issues through the parliament. Unfortunately, an alarming number of people seem not to know this.
Sounds like working as intended - "supporting an idea" is meaningless without expressing priorities and strength - you claim to support some idea but will demonstrably give up on it if it gets you to the ruling majority - if I care about this idea I should not vote for you.
"We support clean energy" - "we had to support opening new coal plants because we wanted to get support on our budget proposal for some agency"... Do I really give a shit they claim to support clean energy ?
You're right, that's why the platform should be able to show all the promises a party has made and how many they also implemented (helped to). That would be decisive for single-issue parties, and still very helpful for major ones - you can see if the delivered anything at all and if yes, on which points. Like, did the Greens deliver anything on their green agenda, or just checked a few points on the social issues: did they deliver on their core points?
I don't think it's quite as clear-cut. MPs are meant to vote according to their conscience, not party lines or coalition agreements.
It's a choice to vote against what a party claims to be their values in order to maintain stability in the coalition. The smaller party could also take a chance knowing the larger party won't abandon their comfy government position over it.
It's also interesting to figure out which values or plans a party has been willing to compromise on, since none of them publicly state this before elections.
I feel like these tools work best if you just use them as an additional data point in your decision.
I think that works extremely well – taken action is relevant while intentions are much less so aren't they?
And building a "coalition" isn't a natural law nor even how things were intended – the house is named "parliament" so there shall be discussion of all voting members prior voting on EVERY SINGLE bill. That's the MPs job description.
A coalition in fact is an illegal voting cartel as since decades each contains the paragraph "there will be no differing votes" while each vote is subject only to the conscience of the MP by definition of the constitution.
But aren't most people disappointed by the social democrats because they don't fight hard enough for their core issues?
Or if they really just bring their core issues through, they seem to be surveillance and not social issues.
If you make a coalition government with the conservatives and you take their program as the coalition program, you did a bad job in forming the coalition.
> If you make a coalition government with the conservatives and you take their program as the coalition program, you did a bad job in forming the coalition.
I like your reasoning. In the end (within reason) I do not care how the laws are implemented, I am voting for the party, which matches what I would like to implement.
That's why I don't understand center-left people not voting left. As if any other party would be willing to implement the program of the social democrats.
I truly believe that the outbreak of socialism within the first four years is baseless fear-mongering.
Have you considered adding references to relevant sections of the party programs on the detailed thesis view?
For example, it might be interesting to see on [1] that the SPD claims to be in favour of the bill they just voted against. This is just one example, but I think an easy way to compare a vote with future claims of the parties would be interesting.
Adding references to relevant sections of the party programs is an interesting idea (especially with your example) to display the discrepancies that sometimes arise between votes and programs.
But that would be a lot of work on top and one would probably have to add a bunch of links for every single vote and claim in the program.
We will focus on what DeinWal does.
Thanks for being here! deinwahl.de generally looks interesting. Some questions for you:
- Is it useful to soberly look at an analysis of a few chosen questions and topics instead of looking at the fuller picture, like for example scandals the parties are involved in? How would a tool look like that includes both?
- The implicit stances of the parties do not seem to really come out. The questions seem to not be designed for that purpose. Is this a limitation of the questions asked, a limitation of the format or are there other limiting factors?
> Is it useful to soberly look at an analysis of a few chosen questions and topics instead of looking at the fuller picture, like for example scandals the parties are involved in? How would a tool look like that includes both?
DeinWal is only one tool and it explicitly excludes stuff like scandals and looks and promises. You don't have to vote according to the result of DeinWal, but you can use it as an additional signal.
> The implicit stances of the parties do not seem to really come out. The questions seem to not be designed for that purpose. Is this a limitation of the questions asked, a limitation of the format or are there other limiting factors?
I disagree. I think the results really reflect the stances of the parties. People on social media who post their results seem to agree with their results no matter whether they are right or left.
But yes, we are limited to the actual votes of the Bundestag and that means that we can not have a question about e.g. education.
Wouldn't have thought though I had the most in common with AfD and Green Party.
Which is no problem, because I roll the dice for my vote since about 30 years.
And neither of them did get my vote.
In political and some other questions I am a supporter of a moderate Rhinehart process.
When the voter is presented with these vote/policy questions, are they ranked in any way, for example, is a climate question 'more valuable' than the autobahn speed.
How is the order of the yes/no/neutral questions decided, for example from serious to less serious? Who decides?
The user of the quiz can skip a question, answer it normally or "like" it with a heart-symbol. Then it is counted twice.
The DeinWal-Team (Martin, Sophie and I) decided the selection, wording and ordering of the questions. We tried to be as neutral and fair as possible. We tried to use only votes where the outcome does not contradict some party values (e.g. because a party thinks a vote "does not go far enough").
The bigger issue is that votes from governing parties and opposition parties are very different things and deinwal.de kinda mixes those together.
As an opposition party you can basically vote what you like, you don't have to consider the consequences (because you often know it won't pass) and you don't have to compromise with a coalition partner.
Having said that: I'm generally not a fan of these tools, precisely because of those issues. Wahl-o-mat has the issue raised by the original poster, i.e. they look at what people announce, not what they do, but the alternative isn't much better, as it's comparing apples and oranges.
> it only looks at what parties claim they will do, not their historical voting record.
In multi part parliametary systems, parties will form governments and small party A has to be prepared to vote against their program or election promise, because that's the concession they had to make to rule in coalition with party B.
Basically all the programs and promises has the form "if we get a majority ourselves and the budget allows then..." but that effectivley never happens. So it's all ambition. Some things can be expressed as promises e.g."we'll never allow X to happen or rule in coalition with Y, we'd rather topple the government and call new elections if that was on the table". If parties fail to live up to that, there is (rightfully) a discussion about broken promises. But otherwise, I think it's rare to see parties say one thing and vote another.
That’s probably less of a problem than you think it is.
Historically it’s more likely than not that promises are kept. (That this isn’t the case is mostly dumb propaganda.) The biggest wrinkle to this is that Germany has coalition governments, so no one party can implement their whole election program.
What is and isn’t done isn’t random, though, and you will find different parties putting a different emphasis one different things. For example, I’m certain that the Greens would drop a great many of their policies on anything except climate if they were elected. However, it’s not as though that emphasis is exactly surprising.
Other than that Wahl-o-Mat is an obviously imperfect tool trying to somewhat simplify something very complex. Which is valuable.
There is a site (deinwal.de) that does what you said and it gave me the exact results. In fact, the wahl-o-mat and other sites merely mirror my own voting behavior. I bet almost nobody other than me actually reads party programs.
I have this simple strategy. I base my decision for who to not vote for based on the behavior of the parties and my decision for who to vote for based on their political program. It's not very surprising that the results were the same.
Parliament work is about making compromises. Between partners and enemies. Between Dreams and Realities. Party Program is vision, voting record is reality after the compromise.
We lost the capability to make and accept compromises.
The only one thing, that is truly additional relevant indicator: Are the parties/parliamentarian transparent and free of corruption/lobbyism.
