For the 2016 general election, we received funding from the Irish Research Council. To date, WhichCandidate has served voters for a number of elections, including the 2014 local elections in Limerick, and the 2016 Irish general election.Īwards: In 2016, we were awarded the prize for Best New Web Application at the Realex Web Awards.įunding: For the 2019 European Parliament elections, we received funding from the Communicating Europe Initiative of the Department of Foreign Affairs. We want to make it easier for voters to compare candidates based on their positions on issues of major national importance. With an ever growing list of new parties and independents, the choice for voters has become more complex than ever. Our goal is to make elections in Ireland more transparent and to give voters the information they need to make the right decision. WhichCandidate is based in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Limerick. Who do I contact?Īny queries or feedback on WhichCandidate can be sent to Rory Costello at the Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Us It is supported by funding from the Irish Research Council. It is run by researchers at the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Limerick. WhichCandidate is not associated with any political party or election candidate. If you are a candidate and were not contacted by us, please let us know. If you would like to see more candidates from your area on the website, please urge them to contact us and complete the survey. Some candidates have declined to share their policy views with us and are not featured on the website. We endeavoured to contact all declared candidates. In addition, if there are any specific questions that you are not interested in, you can simply select 'no opinion' and they will be excluded from calculation. You will only be matched with candidates on those issues. You first select the issues that are important to you, and you are then presented with questions related to those issues. Some issues are more important to me than others. If for example a user has a proximity score of 0.5 to a candidate across all questions, the overall match with this candidate is expressed as 50%. We then take the average proximity between the user and candidate across all the questions that the user has answered. 0 (if one selects Agree and the other selects Disagree).0.5 (if one selects the middle option and the other selects Agree or Disagree).1 (if the user and candidate select the same answer).To give an example, a question might have three answer options: Agree, Neither agree nor disagree, Disagree. How is the ranking calculated?įirst, we calculate the proximity of a user to a candidate on each question. A customised results page is then presented to each user, containing a ranking of candidates ordered by how closely their answers match. Voters who visit the website are asked the same set of questions, and their answers are compared with the answers of the candidates. Each participating candidate is given a public profile on the website, incorporating their answers to the questionnaire. Election candidates are contacted to complete a questionnaire on these issues. How does it work?Ī set of relevant policy issues are selected by the research team in advance of the election. It aims to inform voters about the policy positions of candidates and to help voters to make a more informed voting decision. ![]() WhichCandidate is a ‘voting advice application’ that allows voters to compare their own policy views with those of the candidates standing for election.
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