Politically Encompassed

Economic Left/Right: -4.38
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -4.67

political compass

From The Political Compass test. Anyone else prepared to put their spot on the graph? Please comment.

Oh, and I’m seriously considering donating to the presidential campaign of the candidate closest to me in the political compass (except of course, that would be against the law). It should be obvious to everyone now that who the President of the US is affects the security and economy of the entire world, not just those in the USA.

4 thoughts on “Politically Encompassed”

  1. well I’m pleased to see you’re closer to Ghandi than Mugabe, nearer to Mandela than Bush, all the same, still not far enough left for my liking! 😉 I’ll put my own graph up on my blog in the next day or two, no great surprises though…

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  2. I’m dropping further left and toward the bottom than you are!

    One thing that interests me about this compass is that it is supposed to give new political groupings but doesn’t discuss a person’s attitude toward risk, the future and environmental issues. I think attitudes in these areas can produce different results.

    Bjorn Llomberg might call himself a social democratic economist (I have my doubts) but thinks it wouldn’t be right to spend money on mitigating Climate Change because of the way he views the future. Nicholas Stern might be more likely to be a neo-liberal economist who thinks early mitigation of Climate Change is important because of the way he looks at risk.

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  3. I think that this compass is substantially less groundbreaking than they claim. In particular, I’ve thought along the Authoritarian/Libertarian vs Left/Right lines for a while. For a version of it where they did Principal Components analysis to choose the up/down axis, check out Political Survey. He approximated the meaning of the statistically chosen axis as pragmatism.

    It sounds like you’d want at least a 5 dimensional space to locate someone politically. (I came out a lot less left when I was allowed to say ‘no opinion’, which indicates that my leftiness is largely in things I’m not educated about 🙂

    But views on whether climate change is happening may be more to do with a persons trust for authority figures, or their education level rather than directly stemming from the political beliefs. You don’t want to be able to define all of a persons views in terms of a few figures.

    What I’d like to see is a heat map on any of these things so you could see where the majority of the population were. Comparing that with where the political parties are could be instructive.

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