How did we work out the survey questions?

As you may know, TheyWorkForYou are conducting a survey of candidates for Parliament.

Quite a few people have been asking how we worked out the questions. There are two parts to this, one local and one national.

Local questions

We used the power of volunteers.

Thousands of DemocracyClub members were asked to suggest local issues in there area. These were then edited by other volunteers, to have consistent grammar, and be worded as statements to agree/disagree with, and filtered to remove national issues. The full criteria and examples are available.

You can view the issues for any constituency on the DemocracyClub site. They are in the “local questions” tab.

We’ve ended up with local issues for about 85% of constituencies. They’re really interesting and high quality, and quite unique for a national survey.

Thank you to all the volunteers who helped make this happen!

National questions

This was hard, because we felt that asking more than 15 questions would make the survey too long. We also wanted to be sure it was non-partisan.

We convened a panel of judges, either from mySociety/Democracy Club or with professional experience in policy, and from across the political spectrum. They were:

  • James Crabtree, chair of judges, trustee of mySociety, journalist for Prospect magazine
  • Tim Green, Democracy club developer, Physics student, Cambridge University.
  • Michael Hallsworth, senior researcher, Institute for Government.
  • Will Davies, sociologist at University of Oxford, has worked for left of centre policy think tanks such as IPPR and Demos.
  • Andrew Tucker, researcher at Birkbeck, worked for Liberal Democrats from 1996-2000.
  • Robert McIlveen, research fellow, Environment and Energy unit at Policy Exchange, did PhD on Conservative party election strategy.

They met at the offices of the Institute for Government, and had a 3 hour judging session on 29th March 2010. They were asked to think of 8-15 questions, with multiple choice answers, which could usefully be answered both by members of the public and prospective candidates for national office.

To ensure maximum transparency, the discussions of the judges were recorded. You can download the recordings in two parts: part 1, part 2 (2 hours, 20 mins total).

Details of the broad framework the judges operated under are given by the chair of judges, James Crabtree, a trustee of mySociety, in the opening to the recordings.

Please do ask any questions in the comments below.