Why ask for political parties? Political views are complicated, if all you can do is pick a party this complexity is lost. All those not from the US (like myself) might additionally have a hard time picking a party.
Those are not easy problems to solve and it is certainly questionable if thinking of some more specific questions about political views and throwing them all together will get you meaningful reliable and valid results. As long as you cannot do better than that asking just for preferred political parties is certainly good enough.
Isn’t a model of the outside world built in – implicit – in the robot’s design? Surely it has no explicit knowledge of the outside world, yet it was built in a certain way so that it can counteract outside forces. Randomly throwing together a robot most certainly will not get you such a behaviour – but design (or evolution!) will give you a robot with a implicit model of the outside world (maybe at some point one who can formulate explicit models). I wouldn’t be so fast and just throw away the notion of a model.
I find the perspective very intriguing, but I think of it more as nature’s (or human designer’s) way of building quick and dirty, simple and efficient machines. To achieve that goal implicit models are very important. There is no magic – you need a model, albeit one that is implicit.