How Impuls counts
Impuls shows how a community votes on real policy questions — honestly counted, honestly labelled. This page explains how we count, what our numbers show and what they don't. We voluntarily orient ourselves along the disclosure standards of survey research (including the AAPOR transparency criteria) without being a polling institute.
The most important sentence first: Impuls results show how the Impuls community votes — not "what the country thinks". Impuls is an open participation platform, not a representative survey.
Who is behind Impuls?
Impuls is developed independently — with no party, association or sponsor behind it. We never sell data. The responsible operator is named in the site notice.
How are the questions created?
Editorially, under a strict neutrality contract: both sides of a question are worded as equals and treated equally in the interface (no green/red judgement), abstaining is possible, and where facts are involved we link sources. You can report errors any time via support — we correct them.
Who votes?
Everyone who uses the app. Impuls is an open community — not a drawn sample. That also means participation is self-selected, so the composition of the community can differ from the population as a whole.
How do we count?
- One vote per device and question.
- Results only appear once a minimum number of votes is reached — below that we honestly show "not enough votes yet" instead of random percentages.
- There are no invented, estimated or extrapolated numbers. Every vote shown was actually cast.
- Published aggregates carry sample size and date ("Impuls community · n votes · date").
What do the numbers show — and what don't they?
An honest live picture of the Impuls community, per country. The numbers are not a representative image of the population in the survey-research sense: there is no random sampling and (currently) no weighting against official reference data. That is exactly how we label them — everywhere they appear.
No voting recommendation
Impuls does not tell anyone who to vote for. Profile proximities and ratings are editorial classifications on value axes — not a scientific or official result, and not a recommendation.
How do we protect votes?
Technical plausibility checks make repeat voting and manipulation harder. We keep expanding this protection — vote integrity is a top priority for an open platform.
How do we protect data?
Voting is pseudonymous, political data is only processed with explicit consent (Art. 9 GDPR), and all data can be fully deleted in the app. Details in the privacy policy.
Our commitment
As Impuls grows, the bar rises with it: with a sufficiently large base we will evaluate additional transparency stages — such as an optional weighted second view based on official reference data and independent scientific review. Until then: we claim nothing our method does not cover.