Calculating the nearest political party
Valijakompass shows the overlap between the parties’ positions and the users preferences. In order to simplify the interpretation of the results, the latter are expressed in terms of a percentage of overlap. 0% indicates that a political party and a user’s preferences do not overlap at all, 100% indicates that they completely overlap.
Technically, for calculating the overlap, we use the so called “Manhattan (or „city-block“) distance”, which expresses how close the two respective points are one from another in an n-dimensional space.
At the heart of Valijakompass lies a series of political or policy-related short arguments – the statements – on which it is possible to take a position. For example, Valijakompass offers to users to take a position regarding the statement "People who earn higher wages should have a higher income tax rate ". Users can choose from the following answer categories: 'Completely agree', 'Tend to agree', 'Neutral', 'Tend to disagree' and 'Completely disagree'. Valijakompass also allows users to choose the option 'No opinion'.  
For calculating the overlap, we first translated the answers given by the users into numbers, using the following key:

Completely disagree = 0
Tend to disagree = 25
Neutral = 50
Tend to agree = 75
Completely agree = 100

The same values were given to the positions taken up by the parties. We then started off to calculate the distance between the positions of each user and political party on every statement, and then the average matching percentage across all the 35 statements.

Calculation of Uni-dimensions
Every statement can have some effect on one uni-dimensions. The resultant effect is defined with values: 1 (positive polarity), -1 (negative polarity). Positive polarity means that only positive answers (75-100) increase the value and negative polarity means that only negative answers (0-25) increase the resulting value. Statements with polarity 0 are not included in a uni-dimension calculation.
The resulting value regarding all answered questions for a political party or user can vary from 0 to 100, where 100 means total agreement.
For example, if five statements pertain to the uni-dimension “Ecological”, the first one has a polarity value of -1 for the dimension and the remaining four have a polarity of 1, the user has to answer “Completely disagree” to the first one and “Completely agree” to the remaining four statements to get maximum score on the dimension (i.e., be placed on the right end of the economic growth/environmental protection continuum).
The following list documents how the statements were grouped in order to lead to the scores for the six uni-dimensions.

EUROPEAN UNION: MORE NATIONAL AUTONOMY (-) vs. MORE EUROPEAN INTEGRATION (+)
Membership of the European Union is more beneficial than harmful to Estonia (+)
The European Union should  punish Member States that violate the commonly agreed rules (+)
The European Union should abandon the principle of unanimity of member states in making foreign policy decisions (+)

ECOLOGICAL: GREATER EMPHASIS ON ECONOMIC GROWTH (-) vs. GREATER EMPHASIS ON ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION (+)
Estonia should abandon the goals of the green transition (-)
The use of oil shale for electricity generation should be stopped as soon as possible (+)
There should be a greater focus on developing more pedestrian- and cycle-friendly urban spaces even if this makes car travel more difficult (+)
Annual felling rates for Estonian forests should be reduced (+)
Fuel excise duties need to be at a high level to keep emissions under control (+)

DEMOCRACY: ILLIBERAL DEMOCRACY (-) vs. LIBERAL DEMOCRACY (+)
People should have the right to elect judges (-)
The fundamental rights of minorities must be guaranteed, even if this means going against the will of the majority of the people (+)

ETHNIC MINORITY INTEGRATION: MORE LENIENT INTEGRATION POLICY (-) vs. MORE STRICT INTEGRATION POLICY (+)
The removal of Soviet-era monuments by the state is justified even if the local population does not support it (+)
Estonia should move to fully Estonian-language education as quickly as possible (+)
Citizens of Russia and Belarus living in Estonia must retain the right to vote in local elections (-)
All people who work in Estonia must be legally obliged to learn Estonian (+)
Granting Estonian citizenship must be simplified (-)

REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT: LESS EMPHASIS ON EQUAL REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT (-) vs. MORE EMPHASIS ON EQUAL REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT (+)
A larger part of the overall tax revenue must go to local government budgets (+)
More state institutions should move from Tallinn to different Estonian counties (+)
For a more homogenous regional development, poorer regions in Estonia should be helped out at the expense of richer ones (+)

UKRAINE WAR: ESTONIA FIRST (-) vs. MORE AID TO UKRAINE AND UKRAINIANS (+)
Entry of Ukrainian refugees to the country should be significantly more limited (-)
Estonia should continue providing large-scale economic assistance to Ukraine (+)

Users should be aware that the uni-dimensions serves as an illustrative tool that provides an overview of the political parties and their views on these specific dimensions alone.

Political Landscape
The political landscape is based on similar assumptions as the uni-dimensions, but goes a step further. Namely, while the uni-dimensions represent the political spectrum in six separate dimensions, the political landscape further reduces the complexity of politics and offers only two major dimensions: an economic and a cultural one.
Both of these dimensions range from zero to one hundred. In order to determine the position candidates and users in this two-dimensional space, we need to calculate their respective coordinates on the X and Y axes.
The initial position of a political party on an axis is 50% (neutral). Its position on an axis is calculated over all statements using the same formula as the uni-dimensions. Statements with polarity 0 are not included in a landscape dimension calculation. 1 shifts the position on an axis to the positive, and -1 to the negative side.
The political landscape representation is based on the assumption that, in most political systems, citizens’ and political parties’ opinions on individual issues can be aggregated to a limited number of issue dimensions. In the graphical representation offered to the user, the position of parties (and of the user) on each axis is the average of all positions across issues pertaining to each dimension.
The computation of such averages, on each of the two axes, depends on a priori considerations, both in terms of which dimension an issue belongs to, and which side of the dimension a specific issue positions belongs to.
According to a structure of attitudes of the Estonian political space, we have assigned 14 (out of the 35 statements in total) to each of the two dimensions according to the following table:

ECONOMIC DIMENSION: LEFT (-) vs. RIGHT (+)
Reducing the gender pay gap in Estonia requires strong state intervention (-)
Real estate tax should be introduced to lower labor taxes (-)
People who earn higher wages should have a higher income tax rate (-)
Estonia should lower VAT on food products, even if it reduces state budget revenues (-)
In the health care system, more emphasis should be placed on the personal responsibility of the individual (+)
For a more homogenous regional development, poorer regions in Estonia should be helped out at the expense of richer ones (-)
Fuel excise duties need to be at a high level to keep emissions under control (-)

CULTURAL DIMENSION: LIBERAL (-) vs. CONSERVATIVE (+)
Increasing punishments is more helpful in reducing crime than prevention and rehabilitation
Legalising same-sex partnerships was the right decision (-)
The personal use of soft drugs should be legalized (-)
Abortion rights in Estonia should be restricted (+)
Estonia should make it easier to bring in foreign workers (-)
All people who work in Estonia must be legally obliged to learn Estonian (+)
Granting Estonian citizenship must be simplified (-)
Reducing the gender pay gap in Estonia requires strong state intervention (-)

Both the position of the user and the position of candidates are presented to the viewer as points in a two-dimensional space. Please note that this visualisation does not influence the “Party match” result. Also, five statements were included that do not pertain to any of the two dimensions of the political landscape, or any of the six dimensions of the uni-dimensions; therefore, these contribute to calculate the party matching percentage but do not influence the visualization tools.

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