This application is intended to help you determine if you are Like a Candidate. Here's how! Step 1 - Fill out your short questionnaire on My Positions Step 2 - Review your results and The Candidates Step 3 - Compare Me to each candidate and your friends (Invite Friends) Step 4 - Make sure you're registered or Register To Vote Step 5 - Make sure you vote on November 4, 2008! And hey, we'd love to hear back from you too! If you have any feedback on how we can improve Like a Candidate: submit a review on our about page
Our political survey has been composed such that your answers can be generally categorized as leaning to liberal, moderate, or conservative philosophies. Of course, most of us are not consistently "liberal" on every political issue any more than we are consistently "moderate" or "conservative". Therefore we compute your political alignment by taking a simple average of the leanings of each of your answers.
After we've computed your alignment we go back and take note of how much, on average, each of your answers varies from your computed alignment. We call this variance your "swing" and measure it using a percentage from 0% to 100%. Swing is an indication of how loyal you are to your general political philosophy. A low swing means you are loyal. A high swing means you're not! For example, a swing of 0% means that, in general, for any given issue we expect that you will take a position compatible with your alignment. Whereas a swing of 100% means you are as likely to go along with your alignment as you are to go some other way.
We get asked this a lot. And it's no surprise, so-called "likeness" applications are very popular on social networks. Generally, this type of calculation is known in statistics as a "correlation". Correlations are commonly used in many different industries and sciences and can likewise be calculated in many different ways to give results with slightly different purposes and meanings. In the case of Like a Candidate, we use a customized regression algorithm. Sound complicated? Well, maybe a little. But you probably already have some hands-on experience with the basic concepts our algorithm derives from. From high school math, do you remember calculating the distance between two points on an X-Y graph? At some point, you probaly also expanded on that concept to use a spread sheet or graphing calculator to find a straight line that best fit a scattering of data points. That process is known as linear regression. Like a Candidate uses a somewhat more sophisticated algorithm, largely based on linear regression, to compute similarities while also cancelling out some "party-line" biases. So to match you to a candidate, we compute your similarity with each candidate and give you back the one you're most similar to. We also use the same algorithm to compute the similarity between you and your friends!
When you use Like a Candidate's Compare Me feature to compare yourself to a candidate, you may notice links down the left side of the page labeled "evidence". Evidence is our way of showing you how we arrived at each candidate's set of positions for our survey.
Like a Candidate was created out of a need to clarify politics in an engaging, social network ecosystem. The team that created Like a Candidate comes from a wide variety of technical, social, and political backgrounds. If you're interested in hearing more about other projects being developed by the team or would like to partner with Like a Candidate, we'd love to hear from you! mailto : contact@likeacandidate.com
We are looking for people that are seriously interested in helping improve the application! Our immediate need is for someone that is willing to help us improve the content for Like A Candidate. If you would like to help shape the questions that are asked and document the candidates' views including evidence then please contact us immediately! mailto : contact@likeacandidate.com
