You might find that rankings could work.
"Please rank the following issues in order of importance: crime, health,
education, the economy, ..."
You could possibly have two or more separate questions: for instance one on
the urgency of legislation (or repealing legislation) in that area, and
another on the priorities for public spending.
It's hard to give a weasel answer to this kind of question, though of course
they could still refuse to answer at all. However the incentives not to
answer are lower than with a pledge, because there is no specific promise to
hold them to. But it still lets you distinguish between the candidates you'd
rather vote for.
Then again, it also wouldn't be much of a constraint on their actual voting
behaviour in Parliament. But that's inevitable - there is a direct conflict
between answering questions that constrain your behaviour, versus the desire
not to have your behaviour constrained.
Leigh.
On 8 December 2010 16:20, Mark Goodge <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 08/12/2010 16:15, 'Dragon' Dave McKee wrote:
>
>> Numerical questions could be quite interesting:
>>
>> * How much should a student pay for an undergraduate degree?
>>
>> Obviously this question is fundamentally flawed (3 or 4 year? Science
>> or Arts? Who's paying tuition?) but it means that wishy-washy answers
>> simply won't work.
>>
>
> No-one can, or will, answer that in numeric terms, because - for the
> reasons you give - it's unanswerable in that form. Instead, you'll just get
> a load of identikit answers along the lines of "They should pay as much as
> is fair".
>
> Mark
>
>
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Leigh Caldwell (t) +44 20 7064 6556 (m) +44 7747 062906
Chief executive, Inon http://www.inon.com/
Blog: http://www.knowingandmaking.com/
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