How Does It Work?

Wondering why and how your political soulmate was Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, or Joe Biden? VotingSmarter spent a lot of time and energy establishing our questionnaire — which questions, and why? The exact wording, and how they would be classified (their ideological home). Below is a brief outline of how our development team, armed with the idea for VotingSmarter, eventually ended up with the app we all know and love.

The app is a simple questionnaire where we ask you to choose as many important issues you have among the 16 given. You get matched with the politician (at the moment, presidential) who most aligns with your political bend.

Why choose specific issues?

These 16 important issues were chosen using several different studies (from Pew, and other academic sources) where Americans ranked political issues. We took those rankings and we incorporated as many as we could, i.e. budget, taxation, military, healthcare, etc. We tried to distill politics into 16 key issues — there are more issues that could be discussed, but we felt these 16 were quite relevant to our times. And we always leave the door open for updates in our questionnaire.

Why those questions specifically?

We spent a lot of time and energy figuring out which statement would be best for each issue. We had to break it down to one statement per issue — which was really hard — knowing that we were missing tons of nuances on every issue. However, we want to cover all the bases with our expansion pack, which we cannot incorporate by this election cycle, but will be added later. The idea behind it is the dating functionality where you have fun swiping through the statements to refine your match with political candidates.

In addition, we have eight statements in a traditional “left-leaning” and the other eight “right-leaning” for a good reason. We have them in a partisan fashion because we want to elicit a reaction from the user. We can only have one statement per issue, and we tried to figure out the core of each issue as best we could so that we do a better job of matching you with the candidate that best aligns with your ideological and political bent.

The questionnaire will grow and evolve as VotingSmarter and the electorate do. We are always open to feedback and ideas on how to improve our functionality for our users. If you have any, go ahead and leave them in the comments!

And don’t forget to download our iOS app here.

Contributed by: Anubhav Tripathi (Chief Research Officer)

Edited By: Connor Dobson (Blog Editor & Podcast Producer)

Topic: App Development