I should also mention I noticed that both Donald Trump and Gary Johnson’s scores (candidates who are involved in both the 20 elections) were slightly different between the 20 quizzes with the same questions filled out, which may further support the possibility that there is a behind-the-scenes biasing mechanism in place to balance all the candidates.Īs sensible as this seems, one must also ask the more fundamental question of whether this balancing act is, in fact, an act of partiality in itself. I repeated the test (with a smaller sample size of around 1,000) for the 2016 election and found no significant differences between candidates (other than a slight advantage to Jill Stein that was barely statistically relevant). I also imagine that the resulting percentage we get is rounded (and understandably so), adding to overall error. Next, we’ll do a simple ANOVA:Īll in all, these discrepancies are relatively nit-picky and the consistency of the results both surprised and heartened me.

This is truly impressive given the fact that with a republican incumbent, you have many more, and much more diverse, democratic candidates on the ballot. You wouldn’t necessarily want the added complication of lowering other candidate’s scores around each adjustment, so this methodology could explain why the averages are so much higher than 50%.įirst thing first, we don’t need a t-test to see that the differences between democrats and republicans aren’t significant. In my own little thought experiment of how I might approach building the mechanics of the quiz, a consideration I had was to just repeat our random test many hundreds of thousands of times, and then artificially compensate a candidate’s match percentage globally for whatever the differences were. The first thing I noticed was that all candidates (except for Marianne Williamson, more on her later) are over 50% and very significantly so,- given the nature of the quiz I expected all the candidates to converge toward 50%, but this overage may actually be an indication of iSideWith attempting to correct biases. Mean, Standard Deviation and N for each candidate For this, I created a short bookmarklet, a way to quickly inject javascript into a page client-side. This seems reasonable, however, we will need to repeat the test many thousands of times to ensure any differences are not a result of chance and chance alone. If all of the yes-no questions are filled out randomly, no one candidate would have a statistically significant advantage over another. I submit that if the quiz were truly nonpartisan and impartial in the ideal sense, the following statement would be true: If you recall from above, results in the quiz return a percent match with each candidate, 0–100%. To this end, I thought it would be interesting to subject ’s popular quiz to one of the most basic of these tests, not because I believe they are acting in bad faith or pursuing a partisan agenda, but rather because having worked on something vaguely similar, I am floored by the logistical magnitude of how one would design such a quiz around minimizing intractable bias. Like, the questions are dichotomous, binary, true or false, yes or no - and while that may sound simple enough, I can attest that more time was spent building bots to play my game randomly or semi-randomly to capture invisible and subconscious bias than was spent programming the game itself.

Described by some as “Tinder for fake news”, you’re presented with a statement made by a politician and asked to swipe left if you believe it is factually inaccurate or right if you believe the claim has verity. One of my non-profit’s first projects, a video game about misinformation we did in partnership with the Pulitzer Prize winning organization PolitiFact, aspires to this ideal. The ideal of impartiality is evasive when it comes to politics. What fascinates me about the site, however, is not so much its conceit, but rather its claim to be “nonpartisan” and impartial. Having to gather my thoughts to fill out the questions was rewarding in its own right - and I encourage those who might be interested to try it ( I see it as an especially helpful tool for lower-level elections). It’s a clever way to encourage clinical politics - divorcing emotions and identifying with candidates purely on principles and policy.

Isidewith political party quiz