I have a question that I’m struggling trying to answer. I working on a project which would contain an issue (say School Vouchers or Sex Ed) and list next to it some core indicators to describe the issue. Think of a restaurant review… you would have ratings or indicators for cost, food quality, service, decor, etc. You might also have indicators for whether they allow smoking, have valet service, or whatever. Ideally they would be graphical to give a quick overview of the competing factors that shape a particular issue.

Well, if you were doing the same for a policy issue, what would you include in the ratings or the indicators? The issue is to lay out the core subjective and objective factors that are involved with a particular issue. For example, for school vouchers, there are private interests who would like the voucher money (commercial private schools), religious issues (can vouchers pay for non-parochial schools?), union issues (do private schools have unionized staff?), and class issues (if avg tuition is greater than vouchers, what percentage of people can pay the extra?).

So, which are important? What I started finding out, though, most issues in politics today could have all those indicators on all the time.

I’d appreciate any thoughts from folks.