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What do you do to research politicians in your country?
Before elections or just in general, what do you do to get to know people in power?
I personally use Wikipedia as a clear, quick way to learn about politicians from front to back. Also, near elections, I tend to do a quick web search alongside this to try and get a feel of what current events are saying about candidates, now that they're in the limelight.
Idk, I just pay attention to the news and listen to what the candidates say and do. When they publish policy proposals on their websites, I read them. I listen to their rallies and interviews.
I don’t highly value 538’s metrics. Nor have found Ballotpedia consistently useful, though it can often help get you started. I don’t really care what someone thinks about Trump. I care about what they want to accomplish themselves.
Do you ever find listening to rallies and interviews time consuming? I've personally tried this, but nowadays see it as too much of a time sink.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/congress-trump-score/house/
This is a quick and easy way to see how liberal/conservative your Rep/ Senator is. For more nuance, I then go to Ballotpedia and Wikipedia to read their positions.
I hadn't heard of the two sources other than Wikipedia, so thanks for those!
Discussing the link, do you feel as if a percentage or rank on how much someone aligns with a party or president is an adequate way to judge politicians?
I personally feel as if there's some risk in just looking at the 'Oh hey they support/deny Trump' or 'They fit this party's values' statistics. Trump or any other person/party used for a benchmark is very likely to at some point do something that crosses the aisle to either garner support or because they actually agree with it. Since it's an individual or organization as a benchmark, no matter what they do, it will be grouped into the general reputation of the benchmark.
This could make politicians seem 'bad' for supporting something that a person favors. From the other perspective, this could essentially give politicians a pass, and still seem 'good' for supporting something a person doesn't actually agree with.
I guess my concern is that it's not so much of a tool to figure out how a politician represents your beliefs, so much as it's a tool that's used to apply your bias towards the benchmark to other people.
I'm assuming US Politics for this answer:
I think 538 is a great place to start for a 1000-ft view. They're more interested in the statistics and probability of political races so they're not as concerned with the issues themselves.
It's an outdated style but http://www.ontheissues.org has a great point-by-point breakdown of each candidate. It can get overwhelmingly tedious though.
I find that NYT will provide great point-by-point summaries as elections draw near, but only for high-profile politicians.
For local elections, I really struggle and have no good answer and would love to hear if anyone has anything.
Local elections are where it gets hard in the US. There is not a lot of direct info on any given person, since they're not usually noteworthy enough to have something like a Wikipedia page or analysis by some sort of statistics website.
I think that this is pretty bad since a lot about elections on a local scale is left to word of mouth or potentially biased local news.
Agreed, which sucks because they're arguably the "most important" in the sense of having the most direct impact on your life.
Ballotpedia has some really good information and a variety of links that I haven't been able to find on other websites. They usually have the candidate's social medias and official website, and often include a few of the candidate's platforms for easy access if I don't want to spend 20 minutes searching through a shitty website design.
In the U.S., https://www.vote411.org/ is your generic answer.
It links League of Women Voters questionnaire responses, voting records for incumbents, and a wide range of other information for each candidate or ballot issue, in a largely non-partisan fashion. The site will e-mail you a sample ballot for your precinct with your selections, which you can take to the polling station.
I donate and volunteer with the LWV organization because no one else is performing anything like this function since the death or colonization of local newspapers.
As every party has to release a party program in my country, which is basically they're position on every issue they consider relevant and a proposition how they mean to fix it, I try to at least skim it or read a summary (the actual party programs are often hundreds of pages long). I don't pay attention to interviews or public appearances that much, as they often are meant to provoke knee-jerk reactions too much and are irrelevant anyways because unlike the party program, what is said or promised publicly, doesn't matter.
I'm from Switzerland so I don't really need to research politicians (we vote directly about 10 law per year, people in power don't matter that much). That said there's a nice tool that match your decisions to people in the parliament on the last 20 votes or so.
How does the tool work? Is it provided by the government?
I can't find it back, but basically it was asking you your opinion on a series of specific topics ("should we increase the milk tariffs by 2%") and then would show you the parliament members that voted like you.
In each vote we also have the recommendation of the different political party (we have like 7-8 important ones), so it's pretty easy to see who you agree with.
I'd encourage people to also look into politicians' histories as well as what their current actions and policies are. It helps avoid situations like, for example, democrats fawning over McCain as some kind of bastion of principle and fairness when he was a corrupt, bloodthirsty psycho (those are three different links)
I'd agree that personal history is immensely important. To me, it's a big factor as to whether or not someone gets my vote.
Personally, this is one of the reasons I use Wikipedia, as it tends to do a reasonable job of including someone's past. What do you use to look in to someone's background?
Ballotpedia, Vote411, and Wikipedia have already been mentioned-- I found those reasonably helpful during a recent primary (Vote411 more so). I don't tend to go to candidates' websites as much, but if I want to know where they stand on a specific issue they're not bad.
Local races can be tough. I tend to google and look for question/answer articles and endorsements in local newspapers. I also just recently found a really handy feature on my state's bar website when choosing judges; they have "Voluntary Self-Disclosure Statements," in which the judge candidates describe their work history and approach to law. I felt more confident about one candidate after reading hers, and I was able to eliminate another candidate because he wrote 300+ words in response to a question that started, "In 100 words or less..." (Maybe that sounds petty, but if he can't follow instructions like that I don't have much faith in him as a judge.)