On Facebook

How to use Like a Candidate

This application will help you determine if you are Like a Candidate and will help you and your friends make an informed decision in 2008!

Step 1 - Fill out your short questionnaire on your positions
Step 2 - Review your results and the candidates
Step 3 - Compare to each candidates and your friends
Step 4 - Make sure you're registered or register to vote
Step 5 - Make sure you vote on November 4, 2008!

What is my "alignment"?

Our political survey has been composed such that your answers can be generally categorized as leaning to liberal, moderate, or conservative philosophies. Of course, most of us are not consistently "liberal" on every political issue any more than we are consistently "moderate" or "conservative". Therefore we compute your political alignment by taking a simple average of the leanings of each of your answers.

What is my "swing"?

After we've computed your alignment we go back and take note of how much, on average, each of your answers varies from your computed alignment. We call this variance your "swing" and measure it using a percentage from 0% to 100%. Swing is an indication of how loyal you are to your general political philosophy. A low swing means you are loyal. A high swing means you're not! For example, a swing of 0% means that, in general, for any given issue we expect that you will take a position compatible with your alignment. Whereas a swing of 100% means you are as likely to go along with your alignment as you are to go some other way.

How am I matched to a candidate?

We get asked this a lot. And it's no surprise, so-called "likeness" applications are very popular on social networks. Generally, this type of calculation is known in statistics as a "correlation". Correlations are commonly used in many different industries and sciences and can likewise be calculated in many different ways to give results with slightly different purposes and meanings.

In the case of Like a Candidate, we use a hybrid distance-regressive algorithm. Sound complicated? Well, maybe a little. But you probably already have some hands-on experience with the basic concepts our algorithm derives from. From high school math, do you remember calculating the distance between two points on an X-Y graph? At some point, you probaly also expanded on that concept to use a spread sheet or graphing calculator to find a straight line that best fit a scattering of data points. That process is known as linear regression.

Like a Candidate uses a somewhat more sophisticated algorithm, largely based on linear regression, to compute similarities while also cancelling out some "party-line" biases. So to match you to a candidate, we compute your similarity with each candidate and give you back the one you're most similar to.

We also use the same algorithm to compute the similarity between you and your friends!

What is evidence?

When you use Like a Candidate's compare me feature to compare yourself to a candidate, you may notice links down the left side of the page labeled "evidence". Evidence is our way of showing you how we arrived at each candidate's set of positions for our survey. You can also find the evidence that Like a Candidate has compiled on our website as well!