“Who do I vote for?” becomes the first platform for political education and voter empowerment ahead of the December 1st parliamentary elections. It aims to inform and highlight issues of importance to citizens, and to provide a barometer of political opinion, allowing voters to compare their own beliefs with the programs of the main political parties that have submitted their lists of candidates to this day.
The platform measures the degree of compatibility between citizens and political parties in Romania, based on major themes of interest such as religion, economic development, environment, and domestic and foreign policy.
“We need strong democracies, now more than ever. But to have strong democracies, we need strong democratic institutions like parliament. And to have a strong parliament, we need strong citizens, meaning well-informed citizens, who go to the polls informed and make an informed choice about which party they support. It’s important to move from being confused citizens to being informed citizens, hence the idea of the project, to shed some light in all this information fog and noise, to address real issues, not non-issues,” explained Raimar Wagner, program director at the Friedrich Naumann Foundation.
“ Who do I vote for? ” is inspired by Wahl-O-Mat, a successful platform in Germany, which has become a long-established educational app before every election. In Romania, the platform is developed and supported by the German political foundations in Romania – Friedrich Ebert, Konrad Adenauer, Friedrich Naumann, and Hanns Seidel.
“It’s an app that challenges you, access it with a lot of curiosity. It’s designed as an element to help you understand and decide better. Here’s the interesting part: it challenges you to take a stand on different major issues, to discover your own beliefs, without being influenced by a candidate, it’s just you with your thoughts. Maybe there are questions you haven’t even thought of before. And in the end, you will certainly be in a position to make much more informed and conscious choices. Elections are at the heart of democracy and the democratic process. We need to make sure that the elections are free but equally important is that voters make the right choice that corresponds to their ideas, that they know what they want to get with their vote and that they know what the different parties are proposing”, added Dr. Peer Gebauer, German Ambassador to Romania.
How the platform works
“Who do I vote for?” operates based on a 28-question questionnaire, developed by a research team including Prof. Dr. Ionela Băluță (University of Bucharest), Prof. Dr. Mircea Comșa (Babeș-Bolyai University), Prof. Dr. Bogdan Voicu (Romanian Academy) and Prof. Dr. Claudiu Tufiș (University of Bucharest).
“This was not an easy endeavour, this attempt to measure the parties’ intentions is a first. The biggest difficulty was to find the materials based on which to establish the parties’ positions, campaign texts, proposals, and concrete ideas to be found in the programs of all the parties because if they did not have positions on the same issues, we could not have been able to evaluate. And, of course, we don’t know to what extent the parties expressed their opinions just to make themselves look good or whether they really believe in those ideas. In any case, we combined information from several sources, not just from the answers the parties gave us“, explained Prof. Dr. Mircea Comșa.
The question selection process lasted several months and went through the filter of dozens of internal and external experts, so that from more than 120 formulations, 28 key questions were left, covering major topics such as the economy, environmental protection, internal and external policy, health, etc.
Among the questions are:
- Should religion be a compulsory subject in pre-university education?
- Romania’s economic development is more important than environmental protection
- Do Romanians have too many public sector employees?
Respondents can track in real-time, with each answer to the question, their degree of compatibility with party positions, and at the end, they get a score for each political party – from the highest to the lowest. In addition, respondents can click on each percentage and see how each party answered the questions.
The German foundations’ local partner in the development of the platform in Romania is the Fair Vote Coalition, a civil society entity monitoring elections in Romania.
“This year, the context is more ambiguous than in other years, with presidential and parliamentary elections overlapping. It has become very difficult to distinguish between the campaigns because there is almost total overlap and I think the parliamentary elections suffer the most. Moreover, most of the time, voters don’t have time to browse through the parties’ programs, which are not easy to find either, so the platform is a valuable tool that can provide concrete answers on key issues,” said Septimius Pârvu, from the Coalition for Fair Voting.
“This platform brings us as citizens, with our principles, values and beliefs, face to face with the proposals of political parties. Every citizen will be able to see how close he or she is to one party or another by having an easy-to-use app behind which is a rigorous methodology and the opinions of researchers in the field“, explained Diana Croitoru, on behalf of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation.
At the end of this initiative, the platform will represent a comprehensive database and will provide essential information on the Romanian voter profile. Early next year, the findings of the study will be made public for academic and research purposes.