Poll Results: Why We Care (And Don't Care)

I was interested to find out what exactly made you guys care about politics, and I was slightly surprised with the answers. They made sense, but I was expecting some slightly different trends. (Image: Laila Lalami) Relatively unanimously, participants were interested in politics because of their principles and to ensure they had a word in what affected them. Beyond those two points, the analysis becomes more complicated.

Here is the raw data on the poll:

To me, the most interesting number is the stated lack of interest in political leaders, when that often ends up being all campaign are about. People care about the scandal, promises, and attitude of potential leaders -- sometimes even more than they care about the policies they represent. Ideally a leader represents both themselves and their platform; however, it seems to me that if either aspect shows too many cracks, both problems with platforms or charisma can be equally damaging.

It doesn't surprise me that nearly a majority of respondents considered "Helping Everyone" to be a priority given that this is a progressive blog. The concept of fighting corruption doesn't always come up in the rhetoric of the left, but I noticed that some of my most popular posts deal with the issue of corruption. Thus, I found the low number of people concerned with corruption to be a bit surprising.

I can relate to all of these pre-mentioned options in the poll, but obviously I don't have any trouble caring about politics so I urge anyone who reads the blog regularly and voted for "It's hard to care" to let me know why. Obviously a much larger percent of the population feels this way given the exceptionally low turn-out in the last Canadian election. Even though there was a huge election in the U.S., I think it would have been bigger with a similar level of excitement a few decades ago.

Thankfully no one voted I don't know. I think this was a pretty interesting poll and to those who voted, and those who didn't, write a comment and let me know why you care about the things you do. I'm interested to hear it.