Posted at 12:00 a.m.
Is it possible to predict a person’s vote knowing that they are drinking a café latte in the morning and taking public transport? Or that she follows a vegetarian diet and loves trad music?
Laval University professor Yannick Dufresne is convinced of this. And that’s why he and his colleagues from the Chair of Leadership in Digital Social Sciences Education have developed a new web application that aims to demonstrate this: the Datagotchi Elections.
This “fun and retro” web platform (whose name is a variant of the famous Tamagotchi of the 1990s) is based on several studies and research which reveal that lifestyle habits have a close link with voters’ votes.
The Press has therefore seen fit to join forces with The Canadian Press and the research team at Université Laval to invite you to participate in this survey, which is more scientific than you might think… to questions more serious than there are. appears.
What is your favorite movie ?
How many tattoos do you have?
Have you got pets ?
Using some thirty questions about your everyday habits and your socio-demographic characteristics, the application has a good chance of determining which provincial party you will vote for next October 3… or, at least, for which party vote people who look like you. What the parties call the famous “segmentation”…
Professor Dufresne’s team thus uses non-political variables or variables different from those found in polls to show that there is great wealth in this information and that it says a lot about us. One of the objectives of the app is precisely to make voters aware of the wealth of individual data that is produced every day in the form of digital traces. Data used by political parties.
At the origin of the project, we find an implacable observation: voters do not necessarily vote according to political issues. In fact, political science research has shown that certain variables such as social class, religion, and place of residence have a significant effect on voting choice.
“Traditionally, it was these key variables that predicted a voter’s vote. But with the fragmentation of the cultural and social space, we have more recently observed a decline in the predictive power of these variables”, explains Professor Dufresne.
Hence the complementarity between a tool like the Electoral Compass offered by Radio-Canada, which places voters on a two-dimensional axis according to party platforms, and the Datagotchi Elections, that crosses lifestyle habits.
Hence, also, the scientific objective of the Datagotchi, which collects data confidentially and securely*. One of the basic assumptions of the research team is that lifestyle habits are increasingly of interest in understanding voting choice, which political party strategists have understood, although they remain poorly integrated. in research.
Note that the web platform is governed by a scientific ethical process that prohibits the sharing of data with companies or political parties. They will therefore only be used in an analytical context, which you will benefit from elsewhere. We will indeed publish analyzes and interpretations of the data throughout the duration of the electoral campaign.
* According to the Leadership Chair in Digital Social Science Education: “The data will be used for research and media promotion purposes only. The data is also anonymized and stored securely on Université Laval servers, and meets the most rigorous Canada-wide standards in terms of ethics and data security. These data will therefore be used for the purposes of scientific publications and used in the context of master’s theses and doctoral theses. Intrusion tests were also carried out by a security firm to guarantee the security and solidity of the web platform. »