Finland's voters go to the polls early next year to elect a new president. Yle's election compass has gathered their answers across a range of topics, allowing people to see which of the nine candidates are closest to their views.
The compass is available in English, Finnish, Swedish, Sápmi, Russian and Arabic.
As normal, users answer the same questions as the candidates and receive an estimate of how close each candidate is to their positions.
Using a four point scale, the questions ask where users place themselves on a particular statement, ranging from 'agree completely' to 'completely disagree'.
"The compass measures the distance between voters' and candidates' answers," said Aki Kekäläinen, who heads up Yle's democracy and digitalisation efforts at the News and Current Affairs unit.
"The closer the answers are to each other, the greater the compatibility. Proximity is measured on every statement that the user answers. The candidate-specific compatibility is measured by combining all the answers."
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Clear statements
Traditionally users answer all questions and then receive a result. But it is possible to skip questions if they are not so important in selecting a candidate, and thereby find a more appropriate answer.
Users can also see the most compatible candidate by subject area: Security and foreign policy, international relations, the role of the president, values and Finnish society, and the future.
The team behind the election compass started with some 40 statements, and trimmed that down to 29. The process included a crowdsourcing stage in which some 700 suggestions were sent in via the yle.fi website.
The goal was to include statements that clearly divide the candidates, and are therefore more difficult to fudge when answering.
For example, the question concerning Åland's demilitarisation is as follows: "Finland should station soldiers in Åland."
This is a complex issue related to a century of international agreements, and not a simple question in legal terms or principle.
The candidate's task is however to simply state whether or not there should be Finnish troops there.
Candidates can then open up their reasoning in the accompanying text. The goal was to create a balance between different subjects with phrasing as clear as possible.
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