Thursday, 27th of February, 2003

I thought I’d blogged this ages ago, but it seems not. Since it’s going round email-forward-land again, I thought I’d blog it with the correct URL so you can see where it comes from and stuff.
The straight left and right political divide is, as we know, too simplistic. At Political Compass, a UK-based site, they have a rather good personality-test type thing (usually I hate these things) for you to tell where you stand not just on economic left-right issues but also on the libertarian-authoritarian axis. They draw it up as a nice Cartesian plane, and it’s very interesting to see where one ends up - not likely to surprise one, but interesting to compare with one’s friends and with famous figures.

Since you asked, I came out as follows (remembering that the results are slightly different every time, depending how one’s feeling *g*):

Economic Left/Right: -8.12
LibertarianAuthoritarian: -7.28

In other words: 8.12 to the left economically; 7.28 to the libertarian side.
It’s interesting: I can identify a few questions which I’m never quite sure about - only vacillating between adjacent answers, but still - I’ve moved as much as 0.5 of a point in either direction. No more, so I’m still very much a left libertarian - big shock!

3 Responses to “Political Compass”

1. acb says:
   February 28th, 2003 at 2:24 pm

   Ah yes; the Political Compass. That’s the one which is designed to tell any reasonable human being that they are a Libertarian. I believe it was designed as an on-campus recruiting tool for the US Libertarian Party, or something like that.

   Which is not to say that the (British) web site is a LP front; it could be just someone who has read a lot of Heinlein or something.

2. acb says:
   February 28th, 2003 at 2:36 pm

   Anyway, it says that I’m also a left libertarian, though a bit more of a mugwump than you (-4.12/-4.97).

3. acb says:
   February 28th, 2003 at 2:37 pm

   finally: interesting to see that Phony Blair is a Right-wing Authoritarian. Heh.