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Hello Again Ireland!

We at Saoirse would like to thank everyone who participated in our first leadership survey earlier this week. As you may remember, this is the first in a series of surveys that are intended to help Saoirse become more response to its voters. This particular survey probes the types of traits that Irish citizens value most in congressional candidates. It was created in response to recent changes in the party module that give party leadership responsibility for choosing which candidates receive priority for congressional elections each month. It is our hope that the results of this survey will help guide our party’s decisions about candidate priority selection, and also be of use to other parties as well.

Overall we were very pleased to receive such a high response rate for a survey like this (40 responses from members of 7 different parties). The results of this study, as well as the winners of the raffle, are summarized and discussed below.





RAFFLE RESULTS:

First things first. Congratulations to the three winners of the Gold drawing! Winners were determined by assigning each survey-taker a number between 1 and 41 based on the order they took the survey (+Nogin), and then generating a random number via the random number generator at http://www.random.org/. Survey-takers that did not hold Irish citizenship or who were members of the Saoirse executive council were not eligible for the prizes.




3 Gol😛 Dalmatinac123 (Saoirse)
1 Gol😛 Aries Prime (IUP)
1 Gol😛 Roszondras (ILP)





SURVEY RESULTS:

Below is a simple breakdown of the personal traits or qualities that survey-takers felt were the most important when determining party priorities for congressional candidates. A more comprehensive summary of the results, including distributions of responses for each individual trait, can be found by clicking on the image.


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As you can see, the most important traits turned out to be (in order of importance]:

1. Loyalty to Ireland
2. Personal Trustworthiness
3. Activity Level
4. Knowledge of Game Mechanics
5. Intelligence
6. Independent Thinker


I doubt anybody is overly-surprised by these preliminary results. More interesting, perhaps, are some of the traits that did not place very high on the list of priorities for survey-takers. Two such traits that were particularly surprising to me were in-game experience (i.e. the number of years one has played this game) and previous congress experience. Among other things, this suggests that voters will not punish parties who give priority to relatively novice candidates, as long as they have clearly demonstrated more important qualities such as trustworthiness, intelligence and high levels of in-game activity.

Real-life age and real-life nationality were also shown to be relatively unimportant in this survey. Of course the low number of RL Irish survey-takers most likely skewed this result to some extent, but even taking this into account the responses are still very decidedly in the direction of RL nationality not having much of an impact on voter decisions.

Finally, I found it interesting to see that ideology was relatively unimportant to survey-takers. Even with regard to important issues like foreign affairs, survey-takers were far more interested in personal traits such as independent thinking and intelligence and even sense of humor than whether or not they agreed with their specific policy views. This, however, may again be a reflection of the composition of respondents to this particular survey, the majority of whom were members of Saoirse (which is not an ideological party). It may also be a reflection of the order of survey questions, as Google Forms does not have an option for randomization. Methodological issues aside, another theory is that most citizens simply do not have the time or are not willing to put in the effort to construct coherent public policy views of their own, and are therefore willing to defer to the judgments of more knowledgeable candidates to guide policy for Ireland. This possibility will be explored further in the next survey (coming out shortly), which will focus on the dynamics of policy preferences in Ireland.





RESPONDENTS: Because it is critical to the interpretation of any survey data, below is a breakdown of the make-up of the 40 survey respondents.


Experience (time playing the game):



In-Game Activity:



IRC Activity:


Do you vote?


Current Party Affiliation:


Previously Held Public Office:


RL Irish:






THANK YOU FOR READING!

We hope this information was as helpful to you as it was to us.

If you missed your chance to win gold, do not worry! This was only the first in a series of surveys that is intended to help make Saoirse more responsive to Irish voters. The next survey will focus on your specific policy preferences.


Regards,

The Saoirse Leadership Council
For a Stronger Eire - Together!


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Want to learn more about Saoirse? Join us on IRC at #Saoirse (Rizon), or on our party forum at http://saoirse.forumakers.com/. New players welcome!