Also known as question, issue-statement, question statement (terms can be used interchangeably), a statement is the short sentence on which you swipe your opinion in the app. Statements must be simple, understandable sentences on which different voters will have different opinions – they must provoke a response in your mind, otherwise we can't match you with anyone.

Statements were selected for their relevance for the upcoming elections (connected to EU competencies, hot topics and current affairs debates in the media, EU priorities), completed with curated suggestions from youth organisations and national youth councils. They have been selected to reflect the breadth of the political spectrum that groups embody in the European Parliament, finding a balance between important topics for the different political families.

And you'd be right! The whole point of statements is that they generate a reaction from you , they must lean in a direction: left or right, pro-X or anti-X, etc to differentiate between candidates. Maybe you feel that they go in a certain direction overall, but the app asks you to disagree on the things you don't like, and agree on the ones you prefer – and that's what the algorithm needs to find a match! Statements don't tell you what to think, they simply demand your opinion about them.

No, the questionnaire presents the same set of questions for all users, no matter where they use the vote or will vote. And that’s important for us; we’re directly connecting Bruxelles’ debates to you.

They were done by humans! We count on the support of dozens of volunteers who have worked hard to translate Palumba in 26 languages. This was so much more fun than relying on an automated and flawed AI algorithm 😌

If you want to translate the app to your native language, get in touch with us at hello@palumba.eu

We looked at the political manifestos, declaration during debates of the Spitzenkandidaten during the Maastricht Debate for instance, and programmes of the groups and candidates currently affiliated with these groups. We also looked as much as possible at past votes to ensure accountability of these manifestos. Our Scientific Council, composed of political science researchers and experts in different countries (University of Barcelona, University KU-Leuven, London School of Economics, University of Helsinki, SciencesPo), together with our Academic Partner CIDOB, worked hard to determine and proofread the EP Groups' positions.

In a similar fashion to how we positioned European Parliament Groups, a team of 120+ volunteers looked at all the candidates in the EU Member State that they have an expertise on and matched them with their most compatible group·s based on their ideological profile, past votes, manifesto, potential affiliations after being elected in 2019, and public declaration. To ensure independence, every single Localizer - as we called the volunteers in charge of this –  signed this Ethical Charter.

The team reviews the local candidate lists in each country weekly, and if a new list or coalition is announced, we will update the app as soon as we can.

We have tried our best to match EP Groups with local candidate lists accurately and have justifications for all the decisions that were made in that regard. However, a mistake is always possible :) Please email us at hello@palumba.eu and we'll see how things can be adjusted to provide voters with more accurate information.

Every time you swipe on a statement, the algorithm compares your answer to how a European Parliament Group would have answered. It calculates a "distance" between these answers. Then again, and again, on all statements until you finish the test. At the end, the algorithm calculates the average of all these distances and looks at which European Parliament Group is the closest to you. This means that on average, this is the group that was answering most of the time like you.

TBD

Yes, you can definitely look at it and see how it works for yourself! The sources for the algorithm are part of the frontend app’s source code and can be found in our public GitHub repository.

The app and the algorithm run locally on your device. The few backend services that we use run on Hetzner’s servers located in Nürnberg, Germany. To be able to handle a potentially massive number of users, requests are served through bunny.net’s CDN (Content Delivery Network) as a cache layer, again only using servers within the European Union.

Given the sensitivity of running a Voting Advice Application, it has been a priority since day one that we adopt a privacy/data protection by-design approach, intentionally not collecting any personally identifiable information (PII).

As a technical necessity (requesting the content of the app on our EU servers), your IP address is briefly processed, which is considered personal data under the GDPR (but your IP address is briefly processed every time you open an internet page too!). Since the IP address is provided by the internet service provider and not by your  equipment, we do not consider such information to constitute "information stored in the terminal equipment". IP addresses provided in that manner are therefore outside the scope of Article 5 (3), and the consent requirement will not apply under the ePrivacy Directive (Directive 2009/136/EC). We go to great length here by hashing the IP addresses with a rotating random salt and even randomizing the timestamps to make any potential log entries unlinkable. It is therefore impossible to trace any personal information on the basis of the answers you provide to the questions. These are stored in a completely independent database, which simply allows us to identify the answers, without any link to the users.