How your affinity percentage is calculated, with a real question

This test belongs to a family of tools known as voting advice applications. The idea is always the same: take the parties' positions on a list of issues, ask for your opinion on the same issues and measure the distance between them.

It is worth being clear about what it is not. A poll asks a representative sample what people think or how they will vote, and extrapolates to the whole population. An affinity test extrapolates nothing: it only tells you, individually, how far you are from each party. The result is neither a forecast nor a voting recommendation.

Why counting matches is not enough

The naive way would be to count on how many questions you agree with each party. The problem is that it treats two very different situations the same: being one point apart (you "strongly agree", the party "agrees") and being four apart (you at one end of the scale, the party at the other).

The test applies three corrections. The first penalises large distances more. The second gives more weight to your firm opinions than to lukewarm ones. The third, in the full test only, takes into account how much each issue matters to you.

The calculation, question by question

For each statement you answer:

Step 1. The distance. Your answer (1 to 5) is subtracted from the party's position (1 to 5) and the absolute value is taken. The result is between 0 and 4.

Step 2. The base score. It is calculated as (4 − distance)². Squaring makes each extra point of distance cost more:

Note the jump: going from an exact match to just one point apart already costs almost half the score.

Step 3. The conviction factor. It is 0.5 + (distance from the centre × 0.25). If you answer at either end of the scale it is 1; if you answer "agree" or "disagree", 0.75; if you stay in the middle, 0.5. Your lukewarm answers weigh half as much as your firm ones.

Step 4. The weight. The confidence weight of the party's position (currently 3 for all) is multiplied by the importance you give the issue (1 to 5 in the full test; 3 in the quick one) and by the conviction factor.

Step 5. The percentage. For each party, the points from all questions are added up and divided by the maximum that could have been obtained. That ratio, times one hundred, is your affinity.

A real example

Take the statement "People who earn more should pay a higher rate of income tax." Estonia currently has a flat income tax rate, and this is one of the questions on which the parties are furthest apart. Suppose you answer 4, agree, and give it an importance of 4.

Your conviction factor is 0.75, because you are one step from the centre. The weight is 9 for every party (confidence 3 × importance 4 × conviction 0.75), and the maximum on this question is 16 × 9 = 144 points.

Had you answered 5, strongly agree, the conviction factor would be 1, the weight 12 and the maximum 192. Affinity on this question would then be: Keskerakond and SDE 100%, EKRE and Isamaa 6%, Reformierakond, Eesti 200 and Parempoolsed 0%. The same opinion, held more firmly, separates the parties more and weighs more in your result.

The sources for all the positions are listed at the end of this analysis.

The same calculation is repeated for every statement you answer (38 in the full test, 20 in the quick one) and the points add up. That is why the final percentage is not "the share of questions on which I agreed".

Three practical consequences

Answering in the middle is not neutral. It halves the weight of that question, so you give up half of its power to tell parties apart. If you have an opinion, say so.

Skipping questions is perfectly fine. Questions you leave unanswered are excluded from both the numerator and the denominator: they do not count as disagreement. The same applies when a party has no documented position on a question.

Ties make sense. If two parties share a position on most of the statements where you took a clear stand, their percentages will be very close. That is not a flaw in the calculation: on those issues they are alike. When two or more parties end up 3 points or less behind the first, the test offers you up to 8 tie-break questions, chosen from those that separate them most, as long as there are any.

What this number does not measure

It does not measure whether a party keeps its promises: positions come from manifestos, votes and statements, not from an assessment of its record. Nor does it measure trust in its leaders or candidates, and in Estonia you vote for a specific candidate: within the same party, each person may have their own priorities. The test brings you closer to a party; choosing the person is up to you.

If you find a position you think has been assigned wrongly, the methodology explains how to tell us. We check it against the source and correct it if needed.