[QED PRO] Dude, the average voter

Day 2,631, 12:16 • Published in Belgium Belgium • by Boklevski

Q.E.D. Profiler: The Average Voter

Introduction
This is the first QED article describing a group of people, namely… all eBE citizens. Now, that requires a HUGE disclaimer, but I’m just going to highlight a few points:
(1) “The average voter” means the average of the answers of all eBelgian citizens who filled in the survey.
(2) “The average voter” is limited to the people who filled in the survey, which counts to 29. These are all active enough to fill the form; it can be not expected that this reflects on all (two-click) voters.
(3) “The average voter” might change later on when more people fill in the survey here: http://goo.gl/forms/4peQQNdA6M

I’m going to describe the “average voter” a bit as a story of an average dude. (Sorry, Elynea, but I’m afraid the average voter around here is -on average- male…) When the respondents are highly divided on a subject, I’m going to make the dude having a fight in his head between the stances. If the average of responses is in the middle between 1 and 6, I’m going to make him undecided or neutral. This enables me to skip a load of numbers, and just stick to an interpretation in a way that is easy to read about that dude. In fact, let’s just call him Dude.

Note that “the average voter” described below is not “the voter” in general. It’s just an average. Just like the average household has 2.2 kids. It’s not really 2.2 – as that last 0.2 kid would lead to physical impossibilities. It’s on average. Same for the story below.

It you have severe mental objections to accept my method above, please only read further at your own risk.

Meet Dude, the average voter.
Dude is a pretty average guy. No extreme political thoughts, although he does lean towards a side on some topics. But overall, he’s a center-oriented voter, with a slight preference for socialist stances and a government that’s not too strong… although he understands that some rules are just needed in a country. If we would plot his political orientation in the grid, it would look something like this:
(Cheery little dude is still representing me, as described in my 2nd QED article)

Economics
Take for example the economic production. He’s a proponent of production by communes, instead of market-driven companies. He also feels import taxes should be high, to protect local companies. Despite those more socialist stances, he would like to see the domestic taxes, like VAT and Income Tax, a bit more on the low side.

Immigration, Integration & Law Book
Dude is fighting an internal battle with himself on many legal questions. For example, he just can’t choose between having immigration rules or a completely open border. He sees the arguments of both sides, and leans a bit to the side of having some rules on immigration. The same goes for allowing the Honorary Foreigner status or not, although he really doesn’t know what to choose there. He does see advantages of a Law Book, but tends to lean towards having no laws except for the eRepublik Laws.

Foreign Relations & Military
He gets more at ease again when talking about eBelgium’s position in the foreign landscape. Although not really leaning much to one side or another, he’s more at peace in his mind there. When choosing between no MPPs or a load of MPPs, he tends to be in the middle, a bit more to the side of having only a few MPPs. He’s also in the middle when decided whether to join an alliance or just stay neutral. If he would be forced to make a choice, it would be joining a side. He can’t really choose whether to have ambassadors or put those people to work in eBelgium. Both are okay, in his opinion.

Communication
Dude can’t decide on whether we should use the forum. It’s not really needed to stop using it, according to him, but it shouldn’t be the primary method of communication either. He would rather use in-game PMs (Private Messages) for that, although he recognizes that has its disadvantages as well. With the number of government articles, he’s pretty safisfied, although more would always be better.

Anyway, Dude has some important stuff to do, as the Presidential Candidates are publishing articles on who he should vote for. He’s pretty eager to see whether they address some of his concerns!

The Numbers
Okay, boring stuff coming up. However, to satisfy your hunger for transparency, here are the results I based the story above on:

Quick explanation: Average is the average (duh), and "Relative to middle" shows which 'extreme' the average is more towards. Negative 'Relative to middle' is leaning towards Extreme 1, positive is leaning towards Extreme 2. Standard Deviation is quickly explained in my previous article, being the root of the sum of the square of the distances from each individual responses to the responses' average. Details and a better explanation than I could ever give can be googled.

Don’t forget to leave a message for Dude in the comments section below!

Kind regards,

Boklevski
Q.E.D. Researcher