How BchiroMat works

1. Selecting the statements

The questionnaire contains 30 statements in 7 areas. Each statement is assessed for its relevance to policy and public debate in Israel, its ability to distinguish among party positions, its clarity, and the amount of public information available.

Display topics organize the questionnaire for readers; scoring groups determine how statements combine into a score; and priority topics are the areas users may double-weight. Keeping these roles separate makes the structure clear without changing the meaning of an answer.

Every statement has an optional ‘Brief context’ disclosure. It states the current legal or policy baseline and the practical change being tested, with sources. The same format appears on every statement so no ideological side is selectively highlighted; the context does not affect scoring.

2. How a party position is determined

For each statement, the public record is checked to determine whether the party agrees, disagrees, is neutral, is internally divided, or has no clear public position. When current leadership, a binding decision, or a clear faction majority establishes the party's practical policy despite dissent, a position is recorded and the internal disagreement is shown beside it. A position is never filled in merely from a left–right label.

1. 1A current official party platform or policy programme
2. 2A recorded vote, legislation, official transcript, or documented governing action
3. 3A direct statement by party leadership or an attributable interview
4. 4Reliable reporting of a clear party commitment

Evidence strength describes how strong and current the support is, not how intensely or unanimously the party holds the view. Internal debate is disclosed separately and does not pull a party toward the midpoint in the primary score.

3. Exact numerical mapping

Your answers are mapped to a −1 to 1 scale. Party positions remain three-level so the data does not imply unsupported precision. Both agreement options share one policy direction, as do both opposition options.

Important: “Neither agree nor disagree” is the midpoint (0) and is scored. Choose “Don’t know / skip” if you do not know or do not want the statement to affect the result at all.

4. Topic scoring and base weights

1. Within each scoring group, points are averaged only across answered statements for which the party has a clear, comparable position.
2. A group’s effective weight is its base weight, multiplied by 2 if selected as a priority, and multiplied by that party’s comparable-position coverage in the group.
3. The overall match is the weighted mean of the available scoring groups and is rounded to a whole percentage.

Therefore x2 means twice that topic’s disclosed base weight, not twice every other topic. Base weights are part of the scoring method, and they are changed only after testing how the change affects results.

5. Missing data and the percentage denominator

A user skip, no documented party position, and an unresolved internal disagreement receive no points and are not treated as agreement, disagreement, or neutrality. If current leadership, a binding decision, or a clear majority establishes the party’s practical position, that position is used and the internal disagreement is shown beside it. Missing positions are neither inferred from ideology nor assigned an arbitrary penalty.

This means each party may have a different denominator: the percentage is the match between your answers and that party’s documented, comparable positions. When a party has fewer available positions in an area, that area carries less weight in its result; percentages based on different amounts of information are therefore not statistically identical.

A result based on fewer than 65% of the answers that could be compared is marked as having less available information. The label highlights a limitation in the available information; it is not a statistical confidence interval.

6. Ties and display order

Parties are first ordered by rounded match percentage, highest first. A tie is broken in favor of the party with documented positions for a larger share of the user’s answers. If that is also equal, parties are ordered alphabetically by their Hebrew display names. The final rule keeps the display consistent and does not imply a substantive difference in fit.