About
Designed to help resolve this problem, Stance is a system that promotes political representation. Most voters don’t care to read the political platform for the senators that represent them, or even know their names.
Stance helps you understand who is representing you without tedious research. We’ve done the hard work for you. After you take a short political survey that covers flagship issues, we use an algorithm to compare your responses to the beliefs of U.S. senators. Based on that data, we can calculate how well each senator represents you on a ten-point scale.
Built by George, Jack, and Andrew.
Limitations
Stance is a powerful tool, but keep in mind, we only have a snapshot of your political perspective. Our quiz covers the topics identified by voters as the most important areas: gun control, abortion, economy, budget, healthcare, climate change, racial inequality, taxes, border security, economy, and death penalty, but our questions are also curt and sometimes binary.
This means we don't gain a comprehensive understanding of your political stance. This is by choice. After all, we do not want to bombard you with a 100-question survey, even if it would allow us to get to know you more deeply. This choice was made to keep our service accessible, but it means you should take our calculations with a grain of salt.
To understand how well each senator is representing you, we had to understand what each senator represents. This can be difficult. Sometimes, we must rely on their voting data to infer their perspective on political issues, but some senators don't vote based on their beliefs. For example, senator Joe Manchin (D-W.VA) might verbally assert his belief that humans are responsible for the Earth warming, but he may vote against climate change reform because the economy of West Virginia relies heavily on its coal market.
Nonetheless, we believe the resulting effect is the same. If two senators disagree on an idea, but vote the same way, it will impact you in the same way.
To the user: we love that you use Stance. Whether you like (or know) it or not, legislation that passes through the Senate probably affects you. Our system makes it easy to find the representatives who have advocated and will most likely continue to advocate for what you believe in. We created stanceproject.org to foster political accountability and representation, but we also want to acknowledge its limitations.
Research Process
Before designing the inteface, connecting the back-end, and making the system function, we spent a total of fifty hours determining each U.S. Senator’s most probable answer to the Stance survey questions. This work included combing through voting records, online policy platforms, and viewing copious Senate hearings to understand each Senator's viewpoints on the ten issues.
If you have any questions regarding our research process, or if you find any potential discrepancies in our work, please contact team@stanceproject.org.
About the Site
This website was built with css, html, and js, using the infastructure TailwindCSS. This site is currently operated by George, Jack, and Andrew.
If you have any questions regarding our research process, or if you find any potential discrepancies in our work, please contact george@stanceproject.org
