Another approach to informative campaigning

Candidates stand to benefit from engaging in informative campaigning when doing so entices more voter support than it loses. The traditional approach is for the candidate to inform voters of his or her position in the issue space. In this way, all voters whose ideal point is closest to that candidate will vote for him or her as opposed to a more distant candidate. But what about ignorant voters? To clarify, not voters ignorant of the candidate’s position, but of their own position. Surely not every voter has settled into a comfortable position of the left-right political continuum. What if, instead of informing a voter of the candidate's position, the candidate informed the voter of the voter's position? If the two positions were to just happen to align, what an epiphanic moment that would be for the voter; not only would they have found their niche on the political spectrum, but also their candidate for the next election. Perhaps this is one of the motivations behind The World's Smallest Political Quiz (WSPQ), published by the Advocates for Self-Government. The Advocates, a “non-profit, non-partisan libertarian educational organization,” claim that while only 2% of the voting population identifies itself as libertarian, a full 16% is libertarian. The Advocates place much of the blame for this disparity on the following, widely used “left-right” political spectrum paradigm <------- left ------- center -------- right --------> They claim that: "...This model is misleading and fatally flawed. It doesn't have a place for many millions of people who don't fit neatly into some variant of liberal or conservative. "(excerpt from section 2) "... Libertarians are probably the largest group that the "left-right" line excludes. A more accurate political map shows that many people now labeled "liberal" or "conservative" are actually more libertarian than anything else -- but they don't know it, because the rigid and artificial division of American politics into "left-right" doesn't allow for that. Libertarians thus have a big stake in seeing a more accurate map accepted. "(excerpt from section 5)

For this cause, David Nolan created what is now referred to the as the Nolan Chart. The chart is a mapping of the political spectrum that separates out personal and economic issues. It is a basis for the WSPQ that the Advocates advocate (*groan*). As written above, the Advocates claim that the distribution of potential voters over Nolan’s chart is more favorably skewed toward libertarian views. If it is true that there are many “undiscovered” libertarians out there, voter-side informative campaigning may be a productive way for libertarian candidates to attract voters. But hey, if your quiz results don’t sway you, don’t give up on the libertarian viewpoint just yet. If not for the quiz, do it for your economic heroes, James Buchanan and Milton Friedman.