Vote Compass: Find out how your views compare to party platforms in the 2023 Alberta election

When you're not sure which way to go, a compass can help.

It won't guide you directly to your destination, but it will give you confidence you're headed in the right direction.

That's the inspiration behind Vote Compass, an online tool that takes its name from the old-school navigational aid.

"The purpose of Vote Compass is to help people navigate the political landscape, and better understand how their views compare with those of the different parties," said Clifton van der Linden, CEO of Vox Pop Labs, which developed the tool.

Unlike a modern GPS device, a compass won't give you turn-by-turn directions. Similarly, Vote Compass won't tell you whom to vote for.

Instead, it will use your responses to 30 questions about your priorities and your positions on various issues to show you where your beliefs stand relative to those of the political parties courting your vote.

• Launch Vote Compass

"We try to take out the spin and the rhetoric and just give users a straightforward, accessible, and I hope satisfying representation of your personalized position in the political landscape," van der Linden said.

The online tool was developed by political scientists and has been customized for dozens of different elections around the world since 2011.

For Alberta's 2023 election, Vote Compass again includes the participation of provincial political parties, who provided detailed information about their own positions on a variety of issues.

When you use the tool, your responses are compared to the party's responses to generate a personalized report with a range of different results.

"The important thing about Vote Compass is there's no singular result," van der Linden said.

"You'll see how you are situated in ideological space — how you align ideologically with the political parties. You'll see a direct score on the policy issues ... and you'll see a result based on how you evaluate the different leaders."

Once you see where you stand on the landscape, Vote Compass also lets you explore the platforms of each party in depth and gives you the option to weight the issues most important to you.

How does this all work, exactly?

Vote Compass was developed by Vox Pop Labs, an independent, non-partisan group of social researchers and data scientists.

Neither Vote Compass nor Vox Pop Labs are affiliated with any political organization or interest group.

The party responses to each of the questions in Vote Compass are derived through careful research of the party platforms along with consultations between the academic team and the parties themselves.

See the Vote Compass methodology for more details.