Vote Compass explorer: What Australians think about the big political issues

Updated

The ABC's Vote Compass policy tool received more than 1.4 million responses during the 2013 federal election campaign.

We've now crunched the enormous final dataset, weighted it against Census information and are releasing the full data so you can find out who thinks what about the key political issues facing Australia.

Interactive map : View the Vote Compass data by location to see what voters in every electorate think about the big issues.

Explore the full Vote Compass dataset by choosing a question, and then selecting what demographic breakdown of responses you'd like to see.

FAQ

What is this?

When Prime Minister Kevin Rudd called the federal election for September 7, the ABC immediately launched Vote Compass.

By election day, we had received more than 1.4 million responses, as people used the tool to see how their views compared to the parties' policies.

The data has been weighted by gender, age, education, enrolment as a student, religion, marital status, industry and state using the latest population estimates to be a true representation of opinion at the time of the field.

After weighting, the effective sample size is 573,444.

Vote Compass is not a random sample. Why are the results being represented as though it is a poll?

Vote Compass is not a poll. It is primarily and fundamentally an educational tool intended to promote electoral literacy and stimulate public engagement in the policy aspect of election campaigns.

That said, respondents' views as expressed through Vote Compass can add a meaningful dimension to our understanding of public attitudes and an innovative new medium for self-expression. Ensuring that the public has a decipherable voice in the affairs of government is a critical function of a robust democracy.

Online surveys are inherently prone to selection bias but statisticians have long been able to correct for this (given the availability of certain variables) by drawing on population estimates such as Census micro-data.

We apply sophisticated weighting techniques to the data to control for the selection effects of the sample, thus enabling us to make statistical inferences about the Australian population with a high degree of confidence.

The Vote Compass data sample was weighted on the basis of: gender; age; education; students; religion; marital status.

How can you stop people from trying to game the system?

There are multiple safeguards in place to ensure the authenticity of each record in the dataset.

Vote Compass does not make its protocols in this regard public so as not to aid those that might attempt to exploit the system, but among standard safeguards such as IP address logging and cookie tracking, it also uses time codes and a series of other measures to prevent users from gaming the system.

Want to know more?

Topics: federal-parliament, federal-government, federal-elections, australia

First posted