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Q.E.D. Political Survey

Wow. I really mean… wow.

Already, the survey exceeded all I could have ever expected. At this moment, 24 eBelgian citizens have filled in the survey. That doesn’t sound like much, as we have 373 citizens at the time of writing this. However, if you compare it to people active enough to vote in elections, 25% of the active population has filled the survey already! (Last CP elections: 99 votes, last Congress elections: 97 votes.)
We also have had 2 former eBelgian citizens filling in the survey. I hope more non-eBelgians with close ties to eBelgium will fill the survey as well!
[inb4 anybody says anything about Fhea or KN, because they didn’t fill it (yet). So any form of whining about them in the comments is NOT allowed. If you still do so, you’ll acknowledge that you slightly smell of hamster poo. That’ll teach you.]

In the first place, I must thank everybody who filled out the survey. I haven’t been able to respond to you individually, but you can be assured of my gratitude. Secondly, more responses are needed to make a good analysis great – so inform as many fellow citizens as possible to fill the form! Put that Shout Wall to good use.

In this first article, I will detail a bit further on how I will proceed. I also wanted to get into detail on some of the comments you’ve made, but this article is already way too long.

Q.E.D.
I have named the project Quantitative Electoral Demographics. I’ve done that for two reasons:
(1) Because the research is in fact Quantitative and on Electoral Demographics, and
(2) Because having an abbreviation that also means something else is always fancy. The abbreviation even means something in Latin and is used in mathematics and philosophy, so that’s makes it all appear more true, regardless of how valid my survey is.

Enough chatter: Just be aware that anytime you see an article published with the title starting with [QED], it’s either about this research, or a really sad somebody trying to fake such an article.

What’s next?
With the data I have collected, I could already release a whole series of articles, which is exactly what I’m going to do. Such a series ensures that any individual article won’t be too long. It also allows me to look at one subject at a time, which could make for some great debates in the comment section.

My first articles will discuss the opinion of all citizens. Later on, I might get into details on political parties. I could even go into detail on personal political orientation –only after approval, obviously– by creating a profile based on the data and then having an interview with that person to nuance stuff. But that’s all in the far future.

Introduction the metho😛 Political orientation
After receiving the first results, I started to figure what I could do with it. (I know, real researchers would do that on beforehand.) Anyway, I was able to ‘categorize’ and ‘weight’ some of the answers so that I can get a “profile” of any (combination of) response(s). There are three “axis” I made up:

Horizontal Axis: Economical orientation.
On the left, you’ll have the more socialist orientation; and on the right the more capitalist one. It’s pretty standard. Google for “political spectrum” and you’ll be settled for enough reading for 2015.

Vertical Axis: Decision-making.
The other pretty standard thing is… hard to give a name. It’s called something like “Personal freedom”, but I find that way to judgmental, as most Western countries would consider ‘personal freedom’ a good thing (and lack of it a bad thing), while eRepublik isn’t that black-white. So I’m going for “Decision-making”, where the upper part is Liberty / Anarchy, and the lower part is Regulated / Authority. I think in that case I’ve used terms with both positive and negative annotations to keep things as nuanced as possible.

Third Axis: Relations.
The last axis will be represented graphically by –for example– the size of the dots (not by having a third axis, because any form of 3D chart should be forbidden by law until we have holograms). It’s about relations: how much you would aim to involve others. Just note that also here, nothing is wrong with a lower rating, which mostly means you’d rather focus on the own community/country.

If we put all these axis together, we come to the following picture:


You see that little cheering dude? That’s me. Well, it actually is some standard MS Excel clip-art, but it represents me. I don’t really seem to have any opinion, being neatly in the middle, but I can assure you that other opinions differ very much over the responses! However, if I combined all responses into the “average citizen”, it is still pretty much in the middle. For me, that proves for now that my model works well enough. (If the “average citizen” would appear in the picture as a far-right anarchist, my model would obviously be off…) Note that not all questions “weight” the same. For example: to determine the economic axis, it is more important how you stand towards communes and domestic taxes, than towards import taxes (as the latter deserves quite some nuances).

Now, I’m not really going to bother you with all the details of how that little dude got there, but there’s a lot of stuff included on Averages, Standard Deviations, Weighted Factors, and other stuff. However, that’s pretty boring, and this has been enough text for now to hopefully make you curious for more. If need be, I’ll explain my methodology later on.

For now, just shout to every (eBE) citizen to fill in the form! You could use the shout below, but you can shout anything you like!

eBE citizens, your opinion counts in this survey: http://goo.gl/forms/4peQQNdA6M

And feel free to comment or guess where you or your party will end up in that picture!

Kind regards,

Boklevski
Self-proclaimed Q.E.D. Researcher