Elections will be held in Egypt between November 28 and January 10 and the political campaign already began at the beginning of this month. Television is a crucial battleground – some figures suggest that TV is the main source of information for as many as 97 percent of Egyptians – but personal popularity will also be vital; Egyptians are brought up to vote not for great policy platforms but for the people they know and like. Read the rest of this entry »

The European Parliament relentlessly tries to inform citizens about the reasons for voting in the upcoming elections. As on the previous occasion, the EP this time around is running an information campaign to reach citizens and hopefully thereby increase turnout. Similar tasks are fulfilled by many NGOs, which in different countries organize information campaigns regarding the EP and the elections.

What is still missing, however, among other things, is a reliable set of information regarding party programmes. In an idealized version of the democratic electoral process (often referred to in political science as the ‘responsible party government model’), voters make an informed choice between the competing parties both on the basis of their programmes and on their government or opposition record. Most observers doubt that this is the case nowadays, both in relation to national and European elections.

Voters simply do not read parties’ programmes, and instead rely on other sources to make their judgment about which parties to vote for, such as the media. In the European Parliament elections, this problem is further exacerbated by the fact confirmed by many opinion polls, namely that the EU citizens are not fully aware of the nature of the EP elections, let alone their lack of knowledge about party programmes. So what can be done to get voters interested in these elections?

One way of doing this is through developing Internet-based voting aid applications, which aim both at informing the citizens about party programmes on various issues, but which also are able to show which political party is closest to a given voter. This task is an ambition of the revolutionary voting aid application created for the European Parliament elections – EU Profiler (www.euprofiler.eu), launched on 23 April. Read the rest of this entry »