Elections 2024
In the run-up to the European, federal and Flemish elections of June 9, Het Belang van Limburg, in collaboration with VRT NWS, offers The voting test. With this online compass you can discover which party best suits you. Take The Vote Test here.
The Voting Test contains 35 statements to which you must answer ‘agree’ or ‘disagree’. Should we still be able to buy new petrol or diesel cars after 2035? Should there be more bus lines, even in places where few people get on? Should unemployed people automatically lose their benefits after a while? Should service vouchers become more expensive? These are all statements that you may or may not agree with.
To make it easy for you, The Vote Test spans all three policy levels that we will vote for on June 9. In this way, Flemish dossiers (e.g. De Lijn buses) but also federal dossiers (e.g. limitation of unemployment over time) and European issues (e.g. Member States must be able to go deeper into the red) can be discussed together.
Provide insight
Based on your answers to all 35 statements, De Stemtest provides an idea of how close the agreement is with the positions of Vlaams Belang, N-VA, CD&V, Vooruit, Open VLD, Groen and Pvda. These are the seven parties that are included in the online test, because they have elected representatives in one of the parliaments for which elections will be held in June 2024, and because they have a written and detailed party program. This immediately explains why a number of parties that you may soon be able to choose from (Volt, Blanco, Voor U…) are not included in The Voting Test.
Once you answer all 35 statements, you will receive the result: for each of the seven aforementioned political parties you will receive a percentage that indicates the extent to which you agree with the positions of that party. To make it easy for you, these seven percentages are ranked from high to low. This way you can immediately see which political party is closest to you. De Stemtest does not want to offer outright voting advice, but it does want to provide insight into the policy preferences of parties.
Additional buttons
The Voting Test also has some extras. For example, you can indicate that you find certain statements extra important. These will then weigh more heavily in your final score. There is also the shoot-out: if your first two games are very close to each other in the final score, you can fill in five additional statements to sharpen the difference. Anyone who wishes can also answer additional statements that allow a more specific result for, say, only the federal elections.
The Voting Test may look simple, but it is the result of an enormous amount of work, not least for the political parties. They received a battery of more than 200 statements, each of which they answered and substantiated. The preparation, processing and selection of these statements was mainly done by the research teams of professors Stefaan Walgrave (UAntwerp) and Benoît Rihoux (UCLouvain). They are the academics behind the exercise. The content and technical aspects of the whole process were elaborated and supervised by Michiel Nuytemans and Eva Henkens of Tree Company, an innovation agency for digital democracy with extensive experience in drawing up voting tests. You can read everything about its structure in an extensive FAQ in De Stemtest itself.
Take The Vote Test here.