Why this test's barometer is not a poll

This site's barometer shows, from the answers of people who take the test, how many have responded, the average position on the compass by county, the distribution of the closest party and the issues on which answers are most divided. Once there are thousands of tests, it will be tempting to read it as a poll. It is not, and it is worth explaining exactly why.

The difference lies in how respondents are chosen

A serious poll starts from a sampling design: it decides how many people to ask, and with what spread by age, sex, region and other variables, so that the result can be generalised; it contacts those people and, if the final spread does not match the population, weights the answers to correct it. That work makes it possible to say "40% of voters think X" with a calculable margin of error.

None of that happens here. The people in these data came on their own: they searched for a political test, clicked a link on social media or were sent one by someone. Nobody was selected. There are no quotas and no weighting, and there is no margin of error to calculate, because a margin of error assumes random sampling that does not exist here.

This group can be expected not to resemble the electorate: it will probably be younger, more urban and more interested in politics than average. The test is also open to anyone, including people who cannot vote in Riigikogu elections: only Estonian citizens aged 18 or over vote in them. That is selection bias, and more answers do not fix it. A million voluntary answers are still a million voluntary answers.

So what is it good for?

For describing that group, which is no small thing. If most respondents agree with a statement, or if an issue splits their answers sharply, that says something real about the people who take the test. What it does not allow is a leap to "Estonians think".

It is also useful for comparison, with care. Differences between counties within the same self-selected group are informative, even though the absolute level cannot be generalised and the bias need not be the same everywhere.

How we protect respondents

The test does not ask for a name, an email address or registration. Each result is stored with a random identifier. It optionally asks for your age, your sex and which party you would vote for: none of these appears in the link for sharing your result, and the party you would vote for is never published, because it only serves to show you where you agree with it. Your county is not asked: it is estimated roughly from your connection, using a geolocation database installed on our own server.

Aggregates are subject to a minimum threshold: no cell is published unless it contains at least 100 tests. That is why, while there are few tests, the barometer will be almost empty, and a county that does not reach the minimum will not appear in the table. It is not that the data are missing: with few cases, an aggregate starts to say too much about specific people.

We never publish individual data or combine aggregates in a way that would allow anyone's profile to be reconstructed. The details are in the privacy policy.

What about the days before the vote?

In some countries the law prohibits publishing polls in the days before a vote. Not in Estonia: the Riigikogu Election Act only prohibits election campaigning at polling places, and there is no day of silence. That is why the barometer will stay visible until 7 March 2027.

That does not change what it publishes: at no point does it show voting intention or estimate results. The distribution of the closest party describes answers to the test, not how anyone will vote.

How to cite it

If you use these data, the correct way to describe them is as aggregates from a self-selected sample of users of a political affinity test, stating the period, the number of tests and the warning that the sample is not representative. The barometer carries a methodology note with those elements.

We ask that they not be presented as a poll or a vote estimate, because they are neither.