Questionnaire design
The questionnaire aims at measuring political preferences and thus is a central element of smartvote Tibet. The questionnaire was developed specifically for the upcoming Tibetan elections and conforms with the following quality criteria.
First, political neutrality is absolutely essential. Second, the questionnaire should include a broad spectrum of topics. At the same time, the questions should reflect current debates on the one hand, and future discussions which will become important in the upcoming years on the other. Finally, the questions need to be formulated in a clear and comprehensible way. In order to meet the aforementioned criteria, the process of the questionnaire design consists of several steps:
1. INCLUSIVE AND PARTICIPATIVE APPROACH: In order to ensure to cover all relevant topics and to represent different views, backgrounds and positions, an inclusive and participative approach was used, that invited all Tibetans to give input.
2. EDITORIAL PROCESS: The questions were edited over several rounds. For this task the smartvote Tibet project team has the sole responsibility.
3. QUALITY CONTROL: The scientific network Politools, as well as an advisory group, were invited to give feedback in order to ensure that the questionnaire is created in a methodologically sound way, and the content includes all main policy issues.
Taking all these steps we aim to create a comprehensive, relevant and interesting questionnaire, which will support the decision-making process. Our hope with this is to help shift the focus of voters away from personal characteristics, media presence, and regional affiliation and towards an issue-based discourse contributing to the development of our young Tibetan democracy.
Matching
In order to match the answers of candidates and voters, smartvote applies an algorithm based on the euclidean distance. Below you find a detailed description of the matching-algorithm.
Positional matching methodology (PDF)smartspider
In order to calculate positions of candidates and voters on the seven axis of the smartspider graphs smartvote assigns questions to each of the smartspider axes. Below you find a detailed description of the methods, as well as the complete assignment of questions to the axes of the smartspider.