Questionnaire

1. Development of the questionnaire

The questionnaire used to record political positions is the central element of smartvote. The questionnaire is individually adapted for each election it accompanies and must meet a number of quality criteria. Political neutrality and the broadest possible coverage of topics are essential.

At the same time, however, the questionnaire must take into account current political discussions and address issues that will be relevant in the coming years. Finally, the questions must be formulated in a clear and understandable manner.

In order to meet these diverse requirements, work on the questionnaire begins several months before the elections:

• The first step is to collect as many suggestions as possible. To this end, the smartvote team combs through the websites of government agencies, political parties and important interest groups. In addition, a media analysis of the past one to two years is carried out. Parties, interest groups, NGOs, media partners and smartvote users themselves are also invited to submit proposals. In the run-up to the 2019 National Council and Council of States elections, over 1,500 proposals were collected – 1,200 of which came from smartvote users.
• In the second step, a questionnaire is compiled from the large number of suggestions, comprising between 45 and 75 questions, depending on the selection, and complying with the aforementioned quality standards. The smartvote team is solely responsible for this task, i.e. neither project partners nor other external bodies (parties, interest groups, NGOs, etc.) are involved in this phase. Of course, smartvote does not give any guarantees at any time or to anyone that a particular question will be included in or excluded from the questionnaire.
• Finally, the draft questionnaire undergoes a final quality control check, with feedback requested from experts from the scientific community and selected smartvote users.

2. Order of Questions

If the “Optimized Order” icon appears above the questionnaire (see above), the question order is determined by a special algorithm (adaptive questionnaire).

Based on the answers already provided, the algorithm continuously determines which of the remaining questions to display next to distribute the candidates as evenly as possible.

The goal of the adaptive questionnaire is to enable smartvote users to obtain an optimal voting recommendation even if they do not answer all the questions. This is based on scientific studies showing that, in the event of early termination of the questionnaire, it is possible to calculate a more reliable voting recommendation than when the smartvote team defines a specific order (source: Bachmann 2026, https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.06018).

The calculation method used is based on the same algorithm employed to generate the smartmap visualization (see here: smartmap method).

If no icon indicating the optimized order is displayed, the questions are displayed in the order determined by the smartvote team.