About this Quiz

This quiz, much like the Vote Compass tool, is intended to help Singaporean voters make more informed decisions about which political parties their own stances align with the most.

The quiz thus includes questions on major topics that parties in Singapore diverge on, and then informs quiz-takers on which party aligns most strongly with their stances on these topics. It is important to note this is not an election survey or poll. We do not save or collect quiz results, and no related data will be published. Quiz takers are free to share their own results.

This section will clarify our methodology, and how quiz takers can interpret these results to their benefit.

Why we are doing this

Voter quiz tools are used in democracies around the world to better inform voters on and match voter preferences with the policy positions of political parties and candidates in elections. Strong voter literacy – knowledge of party platforms, policies, and manifestos – is essential for any functioning democracy.

Inspired by the work of VoteCompass, a tool developed by political scientists and deployed in over 60 elections worldwide, volunteers from CAPE with support from Jom have developed Singapore's first ever voter matching quiz.

In Singapore’s unique electoral landscape, policy platforms have historically been a less salient factor in voter decision-making, given the long-standing dominance of the ruling party. Voter preferences tend to center on broader considerations, such as party credibility and evaluations of government performance. As a result, the quiz may reveal limited variation in party policy positions.

While our tool acknowledges this reality, it also seeks to refocus electoral discourse on substantive policy issues, encouraging greater engagement with the ideas and proposals shaping Singapore’s future.

Attributing stances to parties

On the results page after the completing the quiz, we include a heatmap of the parties’ stances, with dark blue representing ‘Strongly Disagree’, neutral representing ‘Neutral’ and dark red representing ‘Strongly Agree’. This is to be transparent about how we’ve interpreted the parties’ stances; if quiz takers disagree with our interpretations on party stances, they can interpret their results accordingly to account for that.

As mentioned earlier, the thirteen questions that we settled on are those that we expect the major parties in Singapore to diverge on – indeed, the choice of questions is by no means intended to be exhaustive. Additionally, all and only those parties that have explicitly stated their stances in their official communications (via party manifestos, policy documents, official website content, parliamentary speeches, etc.) on at least ten of these questions have been included; without this minimum requirement, quiz results would poorly represent one’s alignment with parties (one may turn out to align strongly with a party that is silent on most issues, for example).

Regardless, we have included our interpretations of smaller parties’ stances as well, and those can be found both on the heatmap at the end of the quiz, and here. All the documents that we have made use of to attribute stances to each party have been taken from the 2020-present day period, to ensure that policy stances are up to date.

We also sent an email to all the parties to let them know about this quiz, and to ask them if they’d be open to working with us to clarify their stances. (Only SPP replied, but we didn’t get a response after we sent them the stances we attributed to them on our quiz and asked them to let us know if they’d like for us to amend anything.)

How the results are calculated

The way the quiz works is fairly straightforward. The score that is assigned to ‘Strongly Disagree’ is 1, ‘Somewhat Disagree’ is 2, ‘Neutral’ is 3, ‘Somewhat Agree’ is 4, and ‘Strongly Agree’ is 5. (This doesn’t apply to Question 5 as it has slightly different answers choices, but the score assignment for that question is predictably similar, with 1 for ‘Much Less’ and 5 for ‘Much More’.) The ‘Don't Know’ option is not given a numerical score.

Then, for each question with a score provided by both the user and party, the absolute difference between the user’s score and each party’s score is calculated (also known as the Manhattan Distance).

For each party, we then convert this distance score into a similarity score by subtracting the absolute difference from the theoretical maximum distance one can be from that party, then normalizing it by the same maxiumum distance.

Who we are

The Community for Advocacy and Political Education (CAPE) was formerly a student organisation based at Yale-NUS College, until August 2023. We are now an independent, non-partisan, and volunteer-run community bringing together Singaporean students and youth, with a focus on strengthening Singapore’s democracy based on justice and equality, through raising political literacy and building civic capacity of Singaporeans. CAPE's GE Voter Education portal can be found at https://capesingapore.com/ge2025.

Jom is a weekly digital magazine covering arts, culture, politics, business, technology and more in Singapore. Though our initial focus will be on long-form writing and photography, we are committed to a diversity of formats, from short-form video to audio podcasts.