Meritocracy project 2011

Participants

Emil, project lead, concept

Laird Shaw, programming and other technical help

Description

A study of the effects of making the voting system of Denmark more meritocratic, that is, of giving greater power to some people based on their abilities, here operationalized as highest educational attainment.

In the study we used data from a 2005 survey of danes after the 2005 election (see the survey page). The study asked participants to state their education level and what they voted in the 2005 election.

Since the survey was not representative of the actual sizes of the education groups in Denmark, we used another study made by Danish Statistics to correct for the size of the education groups.

We then compared the result of this to the actual results from the 2005 election (see the comparison page). The 'prediction' from our model came very close to the actual results being off by on average 0.7 points.

Then we added the data to a page (see the results page) and added weighting factors. One can set the factors to some numbers and see the results of the 2005 election if votes had been weighted by the factors one entered.

Further reading / data