European Parliamentary Elections and the EU Profiler

I have always been an election junkie. One of my favorite activities is to sit up all night watching election specials on TV. I’m particularly fond of elections where the winner isn’t known until the early hours of the morning (I also enjoy “sudden death” extentions of tied hockey games).

I’m also a devotee of political tests. There is a very good one for the European elections in June at: http://euprofiler.eu/

The test is called “EU Profiler 2009.”  It is the result of a joint project between the Free University of Amsterdam, the European University Institute and smartvote.ch. The great thing about this test is that you get a ranking of political parties across the EU (+ Croatia and Switzerland) according to how well their programs correspond with each possible set of answers to 30 questions, ranging from opinions about bank bailouts and labor market regulations to attitudes regarding immigration and euthanasia.

It’s slightly bewildering when you get a ranking of 300 European parties according to how well they match your policy preferences. And the questions are not given equal weight: the test taker has to  indicate whether a question is very important, somewhat important, or relatively unimportant. In other words, if you indicate that, say, a joint European foreign policy is something with which you totally agree and that you find the issue to be very important, this will improve your match with those parties that both agree with your position and which give priority to that particular issue (this is just an example, I do not find that particular issue particularly important and do not have a strong opinion either way).

The satisfying thing for me is that my answers always tend to generate rankings that look downright eccentric. The reason is that I tend to be “left-wing” on socio-cultural issues and “right-wing” on fiscal policies. This means that certain “centrist” parties appeal to me, while other ”centrist” parties offer a rather unattractive mixture of cultural conservatism and fiscal profligacy.

Some highlights from my personalized party rankings with match percentages, excluding the Swedish parties that I can actually vote for (the subject of my next post):

1 Croatian Liberal Democrats 84.6 %

4 Alternative Liberale (France) 77.5%

10 Democraten 66 (Netherlands) 73.2%

15 Scottish National Party 70.5%

18 Green Party of England & Wales 69.7%

21 Green Party (Germany) 69.6%

36 Conservative Party (UK) 66.5%

53 French Communist Party (!) 64.7%

63 Free Democratic Party (Germany) 63.8%

113 Liberal Democrats (UK) 58.2%

120 Spanish Socialist Party 57.6%

171 Social Democrats (Germany) 51.3%

179 UK Independence Party 50.0%

212 Labour Party (UK) 44.6%

265 Front National 34.4%

272 British National Party 33.6%

275 Austrian Freedom Party 33.5%

282 Northern League (Italy) 32.2%

298 German People’s Union (DVU) 26.1%

300 True Finns 25.5%

I wonder if there are any other people out there who would rank English parties like this: Green-Conservative-LibDems-UKIP-Labour-BNP?