One way to pick your party

The Department of Political Science in Trinity has launched a webiste called pickyourparty.ie, which is intended to give users an indication of the political party closest to their own views. By means of a simple survey, the website calculates the party with which the user's expressed preferences tally most accurately. It might be more accurate, if the survey covered a greater range of questions, but it is an interesting innovation nonetheless.

The mechanism is based on an expert survey of the various party's on the political issues, but it the site notes that "the survey was administered in 2002-2003 any policy-shifts that have occurred since that point in time are not accounted for on this website." Any number of policy shifts have, of course, occurred in that timeframe last few months, e.g. Labour's and Sinn Fein's changed tax policies (albeit a far greater leap in the latter instance). The emphasis of Fianna Fáil's fiscal policy has changed since the 2002-2003 period too, to take another clear example.