Asahi: Yahoo Japan to establish lawmaker-comparison Web site
“Political manifestoes have grown in popularity and importance, but there are still not many criterion in which voters can compare the achievements of a policy submitted by each party or lawmaker,” an official at Yahoo Japan’s service management department said. “We’d like to establish an information infrastructure over the Internet that can serve as a reference for making decisions in future national elections.”
The database can be accessed from a link called “Yahoo! Minna no seiji” (politics for everyone) on Yahoo Japan’s site < http://www.yahoo.co.jp/ >, according to the officials.
The information includes the lawmakers’ parties, posts held, as well as their backgrounds and constituencies. The lawmakers will also provide their own political activity reports, similar in form to Internet blogs, the officials said.
Such information is largely available on the Diet members’ official Web sites managed by their political parties. But Yahoo Japan added a search function to enable users to compare several lawmakers’ opinions on an issue in a single Web site.
I am, as always a n00b…do we have anything like this for the US? I guess we would have to trust 1) the portal to be balanced and 2) the politicians to provide accurate information…