CAIRO: Radio Netherlands Worldwide (RNW) said Monday its newly-launched website Vote Compass Egypt would take into consideration the grey areas in politics, as it assists users in determining the most suitable political party.
Vote Compass Egypt (http://www.masr.bosala.org) focuses on 12 prominent parties. According to organizers speaking at a conference Monday, 30 questions were used to determine the positions of users vis-à-vis political parties through a five-point scoring system.
The team behind the website said the survey used differs from previous projects in its breadth and scope.
Earlier this month, Egypt Electionnaire was launched. By answering 29 questions, users can find their best match from within 31 listed parties.
“Our tool came as a reaction to other binary ones, because they were inaccurate,” said André Krouwel, professor of political science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and founder of Kieskompas BV, the pioneer behind the tool.
He explained that binary choices turned the grey world of politics into zones of black and white, which was completely unrealistic.
The 30 questions used on the website, and the background data on the parties, were collected over three months by an Egyptian team led by Mazen Hassan, professor of political science at Cairo University, and five other researchers from Cairo University and the American University in Cairo.
The listed parties include the Freedom and Justice, Al-Adl, Free Egyptians, Al-Nour, Construction and Development, Socialist Popular Alliance, Egyptian Social Democratic, Al-Wafd, Nasserist, Democratic Front, Center, and Al-Karama Parties.
Hassan stressed that the entire affair “was made by Egyptians, for Egyptians,” and that Dutch Kieskompas was only involved to provide the proprietary software.
Menna Taher and Noura Medhat, two researchers with the team, maintained that the project was purely academic and did not have any foreign or party affiliations.
Krouwel demonstrated what he touted as the better features, such as calculating the voter’s position in a political spectrum determined by two dimensions: an economic-axis (left or right wing), and a morals and social values axis (conservative or liberal).
The political position, he added, can be recalculated according to different factors such as the voter’s views on social security, state reform, foreign policy, or fundamental freedoms.
Through the website, users can also compare their points of view with the parties’.
Krouwel, along with Kieskompas, had begun to refine the method since the 2006 Dutch parliamentary elections, and ever since the tool was applied in other countries, such as Turkey, Canada, and Morocco, with the most recently in Tunisia, which had its first elections last October.
Organizers noted that Vote Compass was built on JavaScript, which enables the program to be run on mobile phones and other devices, such as the tablets.
However, it remains confined to the internet. As Krouwel said, its usage is restricted to sectors with internet accessibility. The organizers were seeking to partner with the press to publish a paper-based version of the survey to be disseminated among families across Egypt to increase political awareness.
