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Building Verto the Methodology Behind the Bite the Ballot and Demos Vote Match Tool building verto the methodology behind the bite the ballot and demos vote match tool Jonathan Birdwell Charlie Cadywould Louis Reynolds March 2015 Open Access. Some rights reserved. As the publisher of this work, Demos wants to encourage the circulation of our work as widely as possible while retaining the copyright. We therefore have an open access policy which enables anyone to access our content online without charge. Anyone can download, save, perform or distribute this work in any format, including translation, without written permission. This is subject to the terms of the Demos licence found at the back of this publication. Its main conditions are: . Demos and the author(s) are credited . This summary and the address www.demos.co.uk are displayed . The text is not altered and is used in full . The work is not resold . A copy of the work or link to its use online is sent to Demos. You are welcome to ask for permission to use this work for purposes other than those covered by the licence. Demos gratefully acknowledges the work of Creative Commons in inspiring our approach to copyright. To find out more go to www.creativecommons.org Partners Credits Commissioned by? Published by Demos March 2015 © Demos. Some rights reserved. Third Floor Magdalen House 136 Tooley Street London SE1 2TU [email protected] www.demos.co.uk 2 INTRODUCTION This document outlines the methodology behind the Bite the Ballot and Demos Voter Advice Tool Verto. A Voter Advice Tool (also known as a Voting Advice Application or VAA) is an online quiz that helps users understand where different political parties stand on key policy issues. While many other Voter Advice Tools exist, Verto is unique in that it has been designed for a target audience of 16 to 25 year olds, especially those who may be switched off by traditional political engagement. With Bite the Ballot leading on the design and promotion of Verto among this target demographic, Demos’ role has been to design the policy statements and party positions – ensuring that Verto is neutral, fair and balanced to all the political parties. This is something that we have taken extremely seriously and we’ve produced this document to explain in detail the process that we’ve undertaken, the decisions that we made and why we made them. Why we created Verto Demos is an independent, non-partisan public education charity. We are by law, not aligned with any political party and are forbidden to work to unduly benefit one political party over any others. Moreover, the Demos team who worked on Verto is politically diverse: their results on Verto span the political spectrum. Our organisational focus on methodological rigour and the accessibility of our outputs ensures that our work is accessible and relevant to a broad audience, and makes us well-suited to safeguard the neutrality, accuracy, rigour and balance of Verto’s design. Our efforts to build Verto in partnership with Bite the Ballot have been a natural extension of our concern for declining trust and engagement in politics – particularly among younger generations – as well our optimism regarding the potential roles that social media and new technologies can play in our democracy. In the past year, Demos’ Citizenship and Political Participation programme has launched three reports into youth political engagement and digital democracy, which have guided our approach to the production of the tool. Introducing Generation Citizen, launched in February 2014, explored the attitudes of the generation that will follow Generation Y: those who are currently between the ages of 14 and 18. We found that, while teenagers do not see themselves as interested in traditional politics, many do see themselves as engaged and passionate about social issues (and a majority of their teachers agree). Unlike previous 3 generations of young people who looked to the ballot box to make a difference, this generation has a range of new tools to make a positive impact: volunteering and social action, social media, career choices and their desire to set up socially beneficial businesses and social enterprises. More recently our report Tune In, Turn Out, produced in support of Vinspired’s Swing the Vote campaign, looked at the attitudes of young voters ahead of the general election in May. That report found that the topic issues that concerned young people were living costs, affordable housing, the NHS, unemployment and the gap between the rich and the poor. We also found that the biggest barriers to turnout among young people were a lack of knowledge of party positions, and a feeling that all the parties are the same. The report also revealed a significant appetite for politics to move online, with two thirds saying they would be more likely to vote if they could do so online. The third report, produced in partnership with Demos’ Centre for the Analysis of Social Media, was Like, Share, Vote, launched in November 2014. This report looked at how social media and new technologies can mobilise voter turnout, particularly among young people. Based on our own experiences using social media to gather data (including gathering over 13,000 completed surveys from Facebook supporters of anti-immigration groups across Europe using social media advertising tools), this report highlighted current best practice for using social media and new technologies to mobilise turnout – particularly among groups with historically low turnout, like young people. One of the key findings of the report concerned the growing importance of interactive and shareable Voter Advice Tools and online quizzes, which tap into the patterns of behaviour that young people display on social media sites, whilst also addressing the barriers to voting identified above. Across Europe, these tools have been shown to strengthen political engagement and increase voter turnout. The main Dutch voter advice application, Stemwijzer, was used 4.9 million times in their 2012 elections, while in Germany, the state- sponsored Wahl-O-Mat was used 13.3 million times. There are excellent tools already in the UK: the most well known being Vote Match, which was used 1.2 million times in 2010, as well as more recent tools like PositionDial. Nonetheless, our research identified gaps in this growing marketplace. Firstly, very few if any such tools were designed with a specific age demographic (for example young people) in mind. Often the language used was complex and could potentially be off-putting to younger users who were not comfortable with politics. The same was often true of the design of these tools, which have often been dictated by academic requirements. While these tools of course need to be academically rigorous – and they can produce a huge amount of relevant data for 4 academics – this often leads to design principles or aesthetics being very much a secondary consideration, reducing its appeal to young or politically less confident users. These gaps in the market, in the context of an increasingly busy Voter Advice Tool marketplace, stimulated us to create Verto. Bite the Ballot and Demos have aimed to design Verto to ensure that it focuses on the issues that young people care about, and endeavoured to explain policies in plain, simple language without presupposing any political knowledge or leaving any political term or concept unexplained. Moreover, we’ve designed the tool for the ‘swipe’ generation, who may be most likely to use such a tool in short windows of 5 minutes or less: allowing them to get immediate feedback based on answers to just a few policy statements, rather than requiring them to run a gauntlet of 30 or more questions before receiving any feedback. Yet, despite our desire to make a tool that is easy- to-use and accessible to the less politically experienced user, we’ve sought to ensure that Verto is at the same time academically robust and completely fair and neutral. This document explains how we did this. Every Voter Advice Tool is created as a result of a series of difficult methodological decisions. These choices include which issues to focus on, what parties to include, what weighting system to adopt, and what information to provider users on the results page (e.g. links to polling place locations, or party manifestos). No tool is perfect, nor can any tool be a comprehensive presentation of party policies and positions. Indeed, even conceptually speaking, Voter Advice Tools can only effectively guide users through an issues-based analysis of the parties, and considerations of trust, individual political personalities and other subjective decisions all contribute to a person’s eventual voting decision. This being said, Voter Advice Tools can be an effective guide, and a fun political education tool through which to engage people who are otherwise uninterested in or not confident about politics and political decisions. It is our hope that Verto will be used by large numbers of young people between now and polling day, and that it will convince at least some young people who may be disillusioned and distrustful of politics of the importance of voting on 7th May. 5 THE METHODOLOGY BEHIND OUR VOTE MATCH TOOL Our main methodological considerations The key principles that guided the development of Verto were the following: • Accuracy: The need to give a truthful view of the political parties’ policies • Neutrality: The need to ensure careful balance so as not to unduly favour any political party • Accessibility: The need for the tool to be easy to understand and easy to use • Relevance: The need to ensure that the
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