Website to show Members’ political leanings

Website to show Members’ political leanings

The UK government’s They Work For You site allows the public to inspect the backgrounds of all their MPs, including details of their voting records, career histories and transcripts of key speeches they have made in the House of Commons.

The site also provides a sensibility analysis for each politician, which examines their voting tendencies on key issues, such as immigration and raising taxes, and gives a snapshot indication of their political leanings.

As part of Digital Jersey’s coding programme, which runs evening classes to retrain Islanders with tech skills, a team of students has produced a They Work For You Jersey site based on the UK version, which is now in the final stages of development. The project received the thumbs-up from Chief Minister Ian Gorst when it was presented at a graduation ceremony at the end of last year and a team of specialist programmers is now applying the finishing touches, while a team at the States Greffe puts together data for the site.

Digital Jersey chief executive Tony Moretta said that he was keen for They Work For You Jersey to be launched before the May election and for details of all sitting States Members to be published.

‘They Work For You UK is an open-source [freely available] programme, so we took that, and the team used data from the States Assembly, which is already in the public domain,’ he said.

‘What this should do is make it easier for people to understand data from the States Assembly. It needs some more work to get a professional touch and we have a team working on that.’

He added: ‘We really wanted to ensure that it had the sensibility analysis functionality, which allows you to see how politicians tend to vote on certain issues. There’s extra work involved with that.

‘We are using data going back to the last election, so voters will be able to research the current States Members and we may go back further, if possible. We don’t have a launch date yet, but we are hoping for March – we want this to go live before the next election.’

He added that Digital Jersey’s coding programme had a 90 per cent success rate of finding work placements for graduates. More information on the programme can be found at digital.je.

– Advertisement –
– Advertisement –