Wahl-O-Mat

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Wahl-O-Mat

Wahl-O-Mat.svg
Basic data

Maintainer Federal Agency for Civic Education
developer GLAMUS GmbH (programming), 3pc GmbH new communication (implementation, design concept & design)

Political Factory (formerly)

Publishing year 2002
category Voting advice application
License Proprietary
German speaking Yes
bpb.de

The Wahl-O-Mat is an internet-based voting decision aid that has been operated by the Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb) since 2002 . It is offered for the upcoming European , Bundestag and Landtag elections in Germany . In addition, the Wahl-O-Mat website links to bpb websites that provide background information on the upcoming election.

The Wahl-O-Mat offers citizens the opportunity to compare their own opinion with the opinions of the parties up for election by evaluating pre-selected political theses . The theses are compiled by young voters for each election and are primarily aimed at this target group. The theses catalog for the 2013 federal election was developed by an editorial team of 25 young voters aged between 18 and 26 from different parts of Germany.

Offer and use

The Wahl-O-Mat had been used over 85 million times by March 2021. It has been available for over 50 elections since 2002 - 5 elections to the German Bundestag, 4 elections to the European Parliament and 46 state elections. The usage record (as of 2020) was held by Wahl-O-Mat for the 2017 federal election with around 15.7 million views. In state elections, the state election in Bavaria 2018 is the record holder with 2.78 million uses. The Wahl-O-Mat was used 9.8 million times for the 2019 election of the European Parliament.

BWBW BW BYBY BY BEBE BE BBBB BB HBHB HB HHHH HH HEHE HE MVMV MV NINI NI NWNW NW RPRP RP SLSL SL SNSN SN STST ST SHSH SH THTH TH Europ.
houses of Parliament 		federal
day 		cover
2002 - - 3,600,000 1/3
2003 97,000 - - - 1/4
2004 - - 38,000 72,000 - 895,000 3/6
2005 315,000 90,000 5,200,000 3/3
2006 140,000 145,000 - 74,000 47,000 4/5
2007 49,000 1/1
2008 - 94,000 - 215,000 2/4
2009 - - - - - - 1,580,000 6,740,000 2/8
2010 650,000 1/1
2011 985,000 515,000 105,000 315,000 - 310,000 - 5/7
2012 1,270,000 170,000 255,000 3/3
2013 1,200,000 - 604,000 13,270,000 3/4
2014 121,000 283,000 107,000 3,890,000 4/4
2015 146,000 348,000 2/2
2016 1,810,000 1,110,000 - 717,000 488,000 4/5
2017 - 2,610,000 297,000 560,000 15,700,000 4/5
2018 2,780,000 1,060,000 2/2
2019 315,000 254,000 590,000 237,000 9,824,000 5/5
2020 334,000 1/1
2021 1,870,000 ... ... 604,000 430,000 ... ... 3/3
Abd. 4/4 3/4 3/3 2/4 4/5 4/5 1/5 0/4 2/4 4/4 4/4 3/4 3/4 3/5 3/4 2/4 4/4 5/5 54/76

Even if the Wahl-O-Mat is aimed primarily at young voters, it is used by all age groups. A third of the users are under 30 years old, a quarter 50 or older (as of 2018, in 2005 the proportion of 60-year-olds was only 5 percent). Women and people without a high school diploma are underrepresented.

story

The application is based on the "StemWijzer" from the Netherlands ( Instituut voor Publiek en Politiek , IPP) and was first in collaboration with the student agency for political communication for the parliamentary elections in 2002 Politikfabrik offered in Germany. Since then, electoral assistance has been used in the run-up to elections at key political levels; H. in all previous Bundestag and European elections as well as in 46 state elections to date.

function

The Wahl-O-Mat will be made available about four weeks before the respective election. The user initially relates to 38 (up to 2008: 30) political theses with the answer options “agree”, “neutral” or “disagree”. There is also the option of skipping theses and thus not evaluating them at all. After all questions have been answered, he can give any number of the theses that have not been skipped double weight.

Its own statements are then compared with the authorized responses from various parties. The calculation rule for this is publicly available. As an evaluation, the user receives a bar chart that shows which party he agrees with and how strongly, as well as a table with a detailed comparison of his own answers with the statements of the selected parties.

Since the version for the European Parliament elections in 2009, all parties admitted to the respective elections that have answered the questionnaires have been taken into account. Previously, only a selection of the parties represented in parliaments was possible. Originally, the user could only compare statements from a maximum of eight parties at the same time. The bpb saw this as a better overview and comparability. However, this limitation has been lifted.

In addition, a downloadable table is available in which all the responses from the parties and other political associations are summarized in a PDF file . However, it is only offered for download on the "Your Wahl-O-Mat result" page, although it does not make any reference to your own Wahl-O-Mat result.

In the 2019 European elections , Wahl-O-Mat users can use a subset of the answers to compare their agreement with parties in other EU countries. To do this, you can have the response data forwarded to the VoteWatch.eu website .

Since the state elections in Rhineland-Palatinate and Baden-Wuerttemberg in 2021, the entries made by users can be changed retrospectively in "Tuning" and the changes can be traced directly. In addition, a function was introduced with the "party comparison", with the help of which the differences in the positions of up to three parties can be shown.

Based on the Wahl-O-Mat, topic-specific offers such as the Digital-O-Mat ( network policy ) or the Sozial-O-Mat ( social policy ) were created.

Media partner

The Wahl-O-Mat is accessible on its original website wahl-o-mat.de . In addition, the Federal Agency for Civic Education cooperates with online media that integrate it into their websites. The media partners are predominantly websites of established newspaper and magazine publishers, public and private broadcasters and internet service providers . For example, in the run-up to the 2017 federal election, a total of 61 media partners were listed on wahl-o-mat.de. The number of these integrations can be interpreted as a high level of acceptance by the media.

Criticism and controversy

Since its introduction, there have been repeated controversies in the election campaigns , among other things due to the choice of questions, the limited answer options or the truthfulness of the answers given by the parties. In addition, restrictions on the possibilities of party comparison and party preselection were criticized and, after legal disputes, were dismantled over the course of time.

Criticism of theses and possible answers

Some parties and politicians criticized the fact that some of the queries did not match the official statements of the respective election programs before the 2005 federal elections . In 2006, it was criticized that questions were “not professionally worked out” or “cannot simply be answered with yes or no”. The parties CDU and SPD jointly refused to collaborate on the state elections in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania in 2006 , 2011 and 2016 .

Consideration of smaller parties

In the first few years, Wahl-O-Mat only considered larger parties until this was prohibited in 2008 by an urgent decision by the Munich Administrative Court. In order to circumvent this decision, the Bayerische Jugendring became the sole software licensee in Bavaria and put the Wahl-O-Mat online - still without considering smaller parties. Thereupon the ödp also had the Bavarian Youth Ring forbidden by interim order from activating the Wahl-O-Mat without considering the ödp for the state election in Bavaria in 2008 .

With a view to the judgment of the Administrative Court in Munich, the majority in the board of trustees of the State Center for Political Education decided against a new version of Wahl-O-Mat for the state elections in Saxony-Anhalt in 2011. The reason given was that the questions did not reflect the basic attitude of a Let the party recognize, and in doing so made particular reference to the right-wing extremist NPD . The majority of the Board of Trustees was of the opinion that “young voters are more likely to be frightened than enlightened” if Wahl-O-Mat recommends the NPD to them as a party.

The fundamental problem is that the positions asserted by the parties in the election campaign do not have to correspond to the later, actual behavior. Other VAA projects such as DeinWal.de therefore use the previous, real voting behavior as a basis or do not allow the parties to justify their votes themselves, but, as in the case of the Wahlkompass , only on the basis of sources .

Maximum number of comparable parties

The limitation of the number of parties to be selected to eight has often been criticized as it puts small parties at a disadvantage if the users do not carry out the evaluation several times in order to compare their statements with all parties. For this reason, the Volt Germany party sued the Federal Agency for Civic Education in the course of the 2019 European elections for disregarding equal opportunities for the parties before the Cologne Administrative Court . In a decision of May 20, 2019, the court ruled that the Wahl-O-Mat in its previous form violated the constitutionally guaranteed right to equal opportunities for the parties in accordance with Article 21.1 in conjunction with Article 3.1 GG and may not continue to be operated in this form. The offer for the European elections was then switched off on the same day. The Federal Agency for Civic Education initially stated that it was not technically possible to evaluate more than eight parties per request. However, this claim is untrue and was not accepted by the responsible judge. One day after the verdict was announced, Die PARTTEI put a modified Wahl-O-Mat copy online with the “Party-O-Mat”, which was limited to eight parties.

Before the state elections in Rhineland-Palatinate in 2011 , the same court had decided differently, which is why the Federal Agency for Civic Education lodged a complaint with the OVG Münster against the express judgment. However, in the 2011 election there were only 12 parties on the ballot papers and not 40 as in the 2019 European elections, so the selection of only 8 out of 12 parties in March 2011 had a completely different effect than the selection of 8 out of 40 parties in May 2019 .

After an out-of-court agreement, within the framework of which the Federal Agency for Civic Education had promised to enable a comparison of all parties from the state elections in September 2019, the Wahl-O-Mat went online again on May 23, 2019.

Alternative offers

In the course of time, further electoral aids have been developed, some of which have taken up the principle of Wahl-O-Mat or “StemWijzer”, but also the points of criticism, and some conceptually pursue different approaches.

WahlSwiper

The WahlSwiper only offers "yes" and "no" as possible answers. The user can also answer the questions in a playful way by simply “swiping” left or right. There is also the option to skip questions if you do not want to answer them, or to weight them twice. Skipped questions are not taken into account when calculating the result. Unlike the Wahl-O-Mat , users have the opportunity to watch short animated explanatory videos that briefly explain the topic. The WahlSwiper appeared for the first time in 2017. The number of parties to be selected is not limited with the WahlSwiper .

Elective compass

The choice compass ( Kieskompas ), the similarities with the parties not in percentage, but rather on a two-dimensional political spectrum , from the results in a two-axis coordinate system. Here, too, users first have to answer a questionnaire.

Your whale

While Wahl-O-Mat and WahlSwiper survey parties, DeinWal evaluates the actual voting behavior of the parties in parliament and lets the user vote on it. That is why DeinWal only includes parties that are already in parliament. DeinWal was published for the 2017 federal elections , the 2019 European elections and the 2021 federal elections .

Election test

More complex multiple-choice answer options are provided for the elective test . In this way, users can answer not only with “yes”, “no” and “neutral”, but also with specific information, for example the desired level of the minimum wage.

Further adaptations

In addition to the electoral aid applications mentioned, there are also adaptations that mostly take over the principle of Wahl-O-Mat in full, but limit it to a specific topic. Examples would be the Social-O-Mat from Diakonie Deutschland or the Agrar-O-Mat from Agrarheute .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Editors. In: bpb.de. web.archive.org, 2021, archived from the original on February 4, 2021 ; accessed on February 7, 2021 .
  2. ↑ Federal Agency for Civic Education: Wahl-O-Mat for the 2019 European elections | bpb. Retrieved May 4, 2019 .
  3. ↑ The emergence of a Wahl-O-Mat , bpb.de, July 27, 2017, accessed on May 25, 2019.
  4. ↑ a b "When selecting the theses for our Wahl-O-Mat, we mainly referred to those topics on which the parties have different opinions and which are of particular interest to young people." And "Der Wahl-O -Mat is also aimed in particular at newcomers to politics and first-time and young voters. ”From Frequently Asked Questions , bpb.de, May 3, 2019, accessed on May 25, 2019
  5. ↑ Imprint from Wahl-o-mat.de on the 2013 federal election . Archived from the original on April 10, 2016. Retrieved December 31, 2013.
  6. ↑ Federal Agency for Civic Education: Wahl-O-Mat for the 2013 state elections in Bavaria . In: www.wahl-o-mat.de . Archived from the original on August 24, 2013. Retrieved September 6, 2013.
  7. ↑ a b c d Federal Agency for Civic Education: The History of Wahl-O-Mat | bpb. March 15, 2021, accessed June 13, 2020 .
  8. ↑ Wahl-O-Mat archive. In: bpb.de. Retrieved September 20, 2018 .
  9. ↑ The users of Wahl-O-Mat , bpb.de, October 29, 2018, accessed on May 25, 2019.
  10. ↑ Stefan Marschall : Idea and Effect of Wahl-O-Mat , bpb.de, December 12, 2005, accessed on May 25, 2019.
  11. ↑ Stefan Marschall : Elections, Voters, Wahl-O-Mat , bpb.de, January 24, 2011, accessed on May 25, 2019
  12. ↑ Computational model of Wahl-O-Mat (pdf) accessible via How does Wahl-O-Mat work? bpb.de, August 15, 2013, accessed on May 25, 2019
  13. ↑ "An evaluation of more than eight parties at the same time can no longer be presented meaningfully and in a way that is understandable for the user in Wahl-O-Mat." Facts about Wahl-O-Mat. (No longer available online.) Formerly in the original ; Retrieved September 4, 2009 .  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www12.bpb.de , as of July 15, 2009, wahl-o-mat.de, accessed on September 4, 2009.
    Still contained in the archived FAQ on the 2009 Bundestag election: http: //www.wahl- o-mat.de/bundestagswahl2009/wahlomat.zip , accessed on May 24, 2019.
  14. ↑ "The Wahl-O-Mat is also aimed particularly at newcomers to politics and first-time and young voters. Here it is particularly important, on the one hand, to encourage independent and conscious discussion, on the other hand, to present the results as clearly, clearly structured and easily understandable as possible. This goal can be better achieved with a self-selected and repeatedly selected limited display of the parties. ” FAQ - Why can I choose a maximum of eight parties at the same time? , Wahl-o-mat.de, accessed on May 24, 2019.
  15. ↑ FAQ - Why can I choose a maximum of eight parties at the same time? , Wahl-o-mat.de, accessed on May 26, 2019.
  16. ↑ VoteMatch Europe 2019 , bpb.de, March 12, 2019, accessed on May 26, 2019.
  17. ↑ Federal Agency for Civic Education: New functions of the Wahl-O-Mat | bpb. Retrieved July 13, 2021 .
  18. ↑ Digitalomat taps into the parties' digital issues. In: Linux-Magazin , August 29, 2017.
  19. ↑ a b Digital election workers. First click, then tick. In: Spiegel Online. August 21, 2017. Retrieved September 21, 2017 .
  20. ↑ Wahl-O-Mat on the 2017 federal election . In: wahl-o-mat.de. Retrieved September 4, 2017 .
  21. ↑ You shouldn't fool. In: Spiegel Online , September 23, 2009.
  22. ↑ Florian Müssig: Wahl-O-Mat makes politicians nervous. In: Heise online . September 15, 2005 . Retrieved September 11, 2017.
  23. ↑ Criticism of Wahl-O-Mat rejection by the SPD and CDU is growing. In: Heise online . August 9, 2006 . Retrieved September 11, 2017.
  24. ↑ Peter-Michael Ziegler: No Wahl-O-Mat support for voters in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. In: Heise online . August 8, 2006 . Retrieved September 11, 2017.
  25. ↑ Carsten Korfmacher: State election: CDU and SPD prevent Wahl-O-Mat in MV. In: Nordkurier.de. May 28, 2016. Retrieved August 2, 2016 .
  26. ↑ Ref .: M 7 E 08.4347
  27. ^ "Wahl-O-Mat" finds a new home at the Bavarian Youth Ring. In: Heise online . September 2, 2008 . Retrieved May 25, 2019.
  28. ↑ Further dispute about "Wahl-O-Mat". In: Heise online . September 6, 2008 . Retrieved September 11, 2017.
  29. ↑ Thomas Struk, dpa: Saxony-Anhalt: No Wahl-O-Mat before the state elections in 2011. In: Heise online . December 2, 2010 . Retrieved September 11, 2017.
  30. ↑ Sarah Sauerland: Where the Wahl-O-Mat has its catch. In: shz.de. September 6, 2017. Retrieved September 10, 2017 .
  31. ↑ This is why this small European party is now suing Wahl-O-Mat. In: Stern.de. May 16, 2019, accessed May 16, 2019 .
  32. ↑ The Wahl-O-Mat is unconstitutional. In: Legal Tribune Online , May 20, 2019, accessed May 20, 2019.
  33. ↑ Friedhelm Greis: European elections: All Wahl-O-Mat results can be displayed that easily. In: Golem.de. May 21, 2019, accessed May 21, 2019 .
  34. ↑ Court stops “Wahl-O-Mat”, tagesschau.de, May 20, 2019, accessed on May 25, 2019.
  35. ↑ PARTY-O-Mat instead of Wahl-O-Mat . Lehrerrundmail.de, May 22, 2019, accessed on May 25, 2019.
  36. ^ Controversy over Wahl-O-Mat: Federal headquarters wants to contest judgment. tagesschau.de, May 21, 2019, accessed on May 25, 2019.
  37. ↑ Wahl-O-Mat on older elections, accessed on May 25, 2019, Wahl-O-Mat on the state elections in Rhineland-Palatinate 2011 as a zip file (762 kB) for download.
  38. ↑ tagesschau.de: Litigation settled - Wahl-O-Mat goes online again. In: Tagesschau. May 23, 2019, accessed May 23, 2019 .
  39. ↑ Find the right party for the federal election with the WahlSwiper. Retrieved August 26, 2021 .
  40. ↑ Martin Scharm : DeinWal.de. Retrieved August 26, 2021 .
  41. ↑ Martin Scharm : DeinWal.de. Retrieved August 26, 2021 .
  42. ↑ DeinWal for the federal election in 2021. Accessed on September 2, 2021 .
  43. ↑ Welcome to the Sozial-O-Mat 2021. Accessed on August 26, 2021 (German).
  44. ↑ Agraromat. April 16, 2019, accessed August 26, 2021 .