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You do not know whom to vote for, do you? Find the answer on EUvox2014

24 April 2014 / 21:04:36  GRReporter
2480 reads

Anastasia Balezdrova

The elections for new members of the European Parliament will take place within a month and the pre-election campaign is already underway. Both during the previous and present election races, European politicians are particularly concerned about the activity of voters as it is especially important in view of the rise of far right and Eurosceptic political parties in many European countries.

In order to help European citizens be informed about the positions of the parties and decide which of them match their views, and eventually go to the polls on 25 May, political scientists from the 28 member states have developed the online platform EUvox 2014 (www.euvox.eu).

On it the European citizens answer 30 questions from the areas of politics, economy and society, and then subsequently the system compares the positions of the parties and shows users which of them are closer to their views. 22 of the questions are the same for all European countries and the rest are country-specific.

Vassiliki Georgiadou, a political scientist from the Panteion University of Athens points out that the countries in northern and central Europe have used similar online voting advisers since the 1990s. "We have been following for years the change in the behaviour of voters who are increasingly interested in thematic sections of the policy of the parties rather than in their general ideology. The platform provides them with the opportunity to limit their search to the areas in which they are more interested."

Her colleague from the Macedonia University of Thessaloniki Yiannis Konstandinidis explains how the platform is organized. "The positions of the parties were processed by political scientists from the European Union member states in complete independence from political parties, government or other institutions. They were formulated according to the public and the formal written statements of the parties," he explained.

The EUvox 2014 platform enables users to compare their views to other political parties in the European Union and to the results of all other users. As stated by Vassiliki Georgiadou, the platform is creative and fun as the user can save the results in order to examine them in detail, post a comment and even share them on social networks.

Asked by GRReporter whether the European parties can draw useful conclusions from the results on the platform in terms of the preference for the national parties that are their members, Yiannis Konstandinidis replied that they strive to have as many followers as possible, therefore accepting a great number of parties, even if sometimes their views are slightly different. "E- democracy is what we strive for. The platform we are now presenting is only the beginning of this process," added Vassiliki Georgiadou.

The platform was created by Dutch company Kieskompas and the European academic organization PreferenceMatcher. The project is co-financed by the European Parliament.

Users answer questions in a completely anonymous manner and the demographic data provided by them at the beginning and only at their discretion are used only for research purposes.

Tags: PoliticsEuropean electionsOnline platformEUvox 2014PartiesVoters
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