How your match with the parties is calculated

This test belongs to a family of tools known as voting advice applications. The idea is always the same: take the parties' positions on a list of issues, ask for your opinion on the same issues and measure the distance between them.

It is worth being clear about what it is not. A poll asks a representative sample what people think or how they will vote, and extrapolates to the whole population. This test extrapolates nothing: it only tells you, individually, how far you are from each party. The result is neither a forecast nor a voting recommendation.

Why counting matches is not enough

The naive way would be to count on how many questions you agree with each party. The problem is that it treats two very different situations the same: being one point apart (you "strongly agree", the party "agrees") and being four apart (you at one end of the scale, the party at the other).

The test therefore applies three corrections. The first penalises large distances more. The second gives more weight to your firm opinions than to lukewarm ones. The third, in the full test only, takes into account how much each issue matters to you.

The calculation, question by question

For each statement you answer:

Step 1. The distance. The party's position (1 to 5) is subtracted from your answer (1 to 5) and the absolute value is taken. The result is between 0 and 4.

Step 2. The base score. It is calculated as (4 − distance)². Squaring makes each extra point of distance cost more:

Note the jump: being just one point apart already costs almost half the score.

Step 3. The conviction factor. It is 0.5 + (distance from the centre × 0.25). If you answer at either end of the scale it is 1; if you answer "agree" or "disagree", 0.75; if you stay in the middle, 0.5. Your lukewarm answers weigh half as much as your firm ones.

Step 4. The weight. The confidence weight of the party's position (currently 3 for all positions, estimated ones included) is multiplied by the importance you give the issue (1 to 5 in the full test; always 3 in the quick one) and by the conviction factor.

Step 5. The percentage. For each party, the points from all questions are added up and divided by the maximum that could have been obtained. That ratio, times one hundred and rounded to one decimal place, is your match.

A real example

Take the statement "Banks, energy companies and large retail chains should pay a special tax." Banks, energy companies and other regulated sectors already pay a special levy on their profits; retail chains are not among them. Suppose you answer 4, agree, and give it an importance of 4.

Your conviction factor is 0.75, because you are one step from the centre. The weight is 9 for every party (confidence 3 × importance 4 × conviction 0.75), and the maximum on this question is 16 × 9 = 144 points.

Had you answered 5, strongly agree, the conviction factor would be 1, the weight 12 and the maximum 192. The order would change: SNS 100%; Smer, Hlas, Republika, Maďarská aliancia, Sme rodina and Hnutie Slovensko 56.3%; Právo na pravdu, KDH and PS 25%; Demokrati 6.3% and SaS 0%. The same opinion, held more firmly, separates the parties more and weighs more in your result.

All the positions in this example are documented, and their sources are listed at the end of this analysis.

Two questions together

Points add up across all questions, which is why the final percentage is not "the share of questions on which I agreed with the party". Let us add a second statement to the previous answer: "The state should cap electricity and gas prices by law for all households, not only for those on lower incomes." You answer 1, strongly disagree, but give the issue an importance of only 2. The conviction factor is 1, the weight 3 × 2 × 1 = 6 and the maximum 16 × 6 = 96 points. Together with the first question, the maximum is 144 + 96 = 240.

Smer and KDH each match you exactly on one question out of two, and yet KDH scores 11.3 points more. On the question where it does not match you exactly, KDH is only one point away, while Smer is three points away: a large distance costs much more than a small one. Sme rodina matches you exactly on the more important question and is only one point away on the other, so it comes first. We checked these figures with the same code that calculates the test result.

The quick test and the full test

The full test has 42 statements, and for each one you can set an importance from 1 to 5 (if you leave it unchanged, it counts as 3). The quick test has 23 statements, and importance counts as 3 for all of them, so only distance and conviction matter. Otherwise the calculation is the same.

All 12 parties in the test are included in the calculation. Each has a position on every statement; 629 of the 756 positions link to the document they are based on, and the other 127 are marked as estimated on the party's page. In the calculation they all carry the same weight. Your age, your sex and the party you would vote for, if you choose to give them, have no effect on the result.

Topic by topic, and the compass

Your result also shows your match with the parties on each topic. It is calculated with the same formula, using only that topic's statements: if, say, you answered three statements on healthcare, the percentage for that topic is based on those alone and on the importance you gave them.

The political compass is calculated differently. It does not compare your answers with the parties' positions; it turns each answer into a number from −100 to +100, depending on which way the statement pushes, and averages them on each axis. Neither importance nor the conviction factor plays a part, and statements on Ukraine and Russia, the European Union, defence and minorities do not count. So the party with the highest match may not be the one closest to you on the compass: your match takes all 42 statements into account, the compass only 26. How the compass places the parties is explained in the analysis Who is left and who is right.

Three practical consequences

Answering in the middle is not neutral. It halves the weight of that question, so you give up half of its power to tell parties apart. If you have an opinion, say so.

Skipping questions is perfectly fine. Questions you leave unanswered are excluded from both the numerator and the denominator: they do not count as disagreement. The same would apply if a party had no position on a question.

Ties make sense. If two parties share a position on most of the statements where you took a clear stand, their percentages will be very close. That is not a flaw in the calculation: on those issues they are alike. That is why the test has 21 tie-break questions that are not part of the main test. If the second or third party in your result is 3 points or less behind the first, the test offers you up to 8 of them: the ones that separate the tied parties most. Only questions on which all the tied parties have a sourced position (never an estimated one) are chosen, and only if at least one of them separates the parties by 2 points or more. Your answers are added to the usual calculation for all parties, with an importance of 3. You can answer the tie-break questions only once, and they do not change your compass. The details are in the methodology.

What this number does not measure

It does not measure whether a party keeps its promises: positions come from manifestos, votes and statements, not from an assessment of its record. Nor does it measure trust in its leader or candidates. In elections to the National Council of the Slovak Republic you vote for a party's list, and on it you can circle up to four candidates; the test helps you find a party, and choosing the people on its list is up to you. How votes become seats is explained in the analysis How the 150 seats in the National Council are allocated.

If you find a position you think has been assigned wrongly, the methodology explains how to tell us. We check it against the source and correct it if needed.