Political Compass beyond "liberal" and "conservative"

[TrainingDummy]

www.politicalcompass.org

Take about 20-30 minutes to find where you're at politically. Political stances are shown on a square grid instead of a line. I think it's a fairly good system for assessing where exactly one's views fall and comparing them to famous politicians/statesmen. The people who made it are obviously pretty intelligent. For the record, I am almost smack-dab in the middle of the lower-left quadrant, making me left-libertarian. How about you? Do you think it's accurate?

[Phaeton]

This has been out for a while, and is flawed in a lot of ways. I've taken it a few different times and gotten different scores, and a few of the questions are ambigous. There's a trend toward the libertarian side of things, which is pretty much inherent in western cultures. No world leaders are in the bottom right quadrant.

I disagree with the placement of a lot of individuals and where I am in relation. Beyond that, while a lot better than the 1 dimensional graph a lot of people use, a 2 dimensional graph has limits and is overly simplified. Political issues and relationships are complex and graphing them is a great way to misunderstand things if you read too heavily into it.

[TrainingDummy]

I found some problems as well. For example, I am down there with Gandhi but am not pro-gun control or a pacifist, I believe in some gun control but believe some wars, once they have been started, require violence to stop. On the whole, however, I seem to have liked it more than you. They DO mention something about taking it multiple times, I don't know if you read that specific section or if it is applicable.

[I_luv_saber]

I agree that there seems to be some leaning, as well as some flaw in it. At any rate, I scored almost exactly dead center.

[Bayou Bum]

globalisation?

I just started taking the test and can't get past the spelling error. And what if I neither agree or disagree?

legalised?

Have we eliminated Z from the alphabet?

[Philistine]

globalisation?

I just started taking the test and can't get past the spelling error. And what if I neither agree or disagree?

legalised?

Have we eliminated Z from the alphabet?

From the FAQ:

"When are you guys gonna learn to spell ?

This grievance comes from those who aren't aware that British and American spellings sometimes differ.

We've been at the centre of some rancour, but we're not going to take offence or harbour any grievances. The catalogue of complaints won't colour this organisation's programme. It's a grey area anyway. And we don't want to labour the point.

--Philistine

[The Rose Knight]

Dead center on the vertical, two clicks to the left horizontal. Yes, it was accurate in that that is how I view myself, but I think that it is flawed in terms of having no neutral response and in terms of a lack of questions, such as gun control and censorship. I like the idea, but the quiz needs further work.

[Bayou Bum]

I didn't realize it wasn't an American site. I guess if anyone is spelling it wrong, it would be us Americans

[dcmdale]

The traditional left-right/liberal-conservative mono-dimensional view of politics has its issues. My most uncomfortable moments in politics had to do with bigoted, self-centered idiots that somehow assumed that I was on their side because I consider myself a “moderate conservative.”

I am not sure, however, that this tool does any better job of describing political leanings. The dimension that they choose to pull out isn’t well defined Many liberals, for instance, favor more governmental control over corporations and less over individuals; the reverse for many conservatives, rather than a simple authoritarian/libertarian scale. As a test, I put in the answers I would have expected from the most obnoxious, bigoted, oil tycoon that I encountered running for office--"moderately authoritarian, moderately conservative," "closer to center than Thatcher." Not accurate.

Even if it were better defined, there are many other dimensions that I would consider more important to describing someone’s political views. I personally evaluate people’s politics more on “thinking vs. responding,” “intrusion to enforce morality,” “legal vs. equitable,” “democracy vs. individual rights,” and “selfishness” scales as well as probably a few others—of course, not all my mental scales are necessarily independent.

[TrainingDummy]

So can anyone suggest a better test they've found?

[scrapinpeg]

Whenever I've seen that test, it also asks you to self-weight each question by saying how important the issue is to you. That can give markedly different results.

Here's one that's on a whole nother topic, ranks you on how strongly you identify with "red" or "blue" America. I'm solidly Blue. http://politicalhumor.about.com/gi/d...d%2F2103764%2F

[scrapinpeg]

There's another one out there called the world's shortest political quiz, or some such. It classifies you on a diamond-shaped graph with conservative, liberal, statist and libertarian apices, plus a centrist region.

Makes me wonder how to best categorize all the different political identifiers out there. A european liberal and an american liberal are often two very different things. Ditto for their conservatives.

And where do you put populists? They pop up in all camps -- conservative statists, liberal statists, conservative libertarians, conservative statists, and centrists. Anti-immigrant types, anti-globalization types, isolationists, union types, gun nuts, and the like are all pretty much populists, but cover the whole political spectrum.

Just thinking out loud. Hmm.

[daeceg]

There's a model out there that postulates that you can put political affiliations on a wheel by the types of political arguments that people make. It's the "Typology of Political Argument" discussed in Charles Stewart's Persuasion and Social Movements. Basically, it takes Rossiter's Political Spectrum model and turns it into a circle so that radical revolutionaries and radical reactionaries are next to each other. Neat model...may be an image online somewhere. What's neat about the Typology is that the center of the circle represents political apathy. The further out on the spokes, the more active the participant.

[The Rose Knight]

Whenever I've seen that test, it also asks you to self-weight each question by saying how important the issue is to you. That can give markedly different results.

Here's one that's on a whole nother topic, ranks you on how strongly you identify with "red" or "blue" America. I'm solidly Blue. http://politicalhumor.about.com/gi/d...d%2F2103764%2F

Again, I wound up in the middle (which is accurate), though after reading the explanation of how they arrived at it, I'd say that it says less about my politics and more about being a font of useless trivia who hasn't seen any of the movies referenced in the last three questions and doesn't own a dog (or a cat).

[Blade]

Yes I do but its Australian and thus based on Australian political parties

http://www.ozpolitics.info/blog/index.php?page_id=206

The site also seems to be down at the moment

[jBirch]

A bit of a tangent here...

I've been hearing a lot lately about how the educational institutions in the US have a liberal bias. What's interesting is the conservative approach to exploiting that as a bad thing by citing statistics that purport to show a relationship between educational level and voting tendency implying that it is good to be uneducated.

WTF? Why does the public put up with that drivel?

James.

[darius]

Why does the public put up with that drivel?

Because they're uneducated.

Things like theoretical physics and evolutionary biology require PhDs to understand, right? That's undemocratic, and thus, un-American.

Stephen Colbert's discussion of "truthiness" hits really close. The talking heads attempting to institute American Sharia, who probably know better, use a clever blend of demagoguery and populism to try to convince their followers that facts don't actually matter as much as faith.

Of course, at the same time, they're walking the walk by soliciting crystal meth from male escorts.

darius