Tuesday, 18th of November, 2003

Here’s an alternative to the Political Compass - another two-dimensional alternative to simple left/right political analysis, but in this case the second axis is utilitarian/pragmatic rather than libertarian/authoritarian.
It’s entirely open-source, so when you go look at my results you’re able to basically see all my answers. This is a bit annoying in a sense, because, as with anyone I imagine, my answers change every time I take such a survey. What’s more, some of the questions were worded as their opposites in the survey (and they change each time), and obviously one answers the questions differently depending on whether they’re positively or negatively worded. If you don’t believe me, take the test a couple of times.

I’m not sure whether I like it better than Political Compass (henceforth PC): my results are actually a lot more variable with this one (henceforth PS) than with PC, suggesting that I’m less sympathetic to the way the questions are worded here than I am with PC. Strangely, PS’s rationale suggests that PC might be skewed “to make respondents lean towards an economically right-wing, socially liberal (’right libertarian’) position”… Maybe I really am extremely left-wing (as my results seem to suggest this time, although I was quite a bit less far-left last time) but I’ve always come out about -7 or 8 towards both left and libertarian in PC, and all my friends are pretty left too.
I’d question less, though, the implication just that PC is designed to skew people towards the libertarian position… This seems reasonably likely to me. Still, it’s given me a lot of pause for thought, and I’m inclined to think that the libertarian/authoritarian divide brings out more differences between otherwise left- or right-wing economic positions than this not-very-well-defined pragmatism/utilitarianism axis.
And if you look at their “Scatter plot” of politicians, Tony Benn (old-school British Labourite), Tony Blair, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Margaret Thatcher all seem to fit within about ±10% from the median with respect to pragmatism/idealism. Is this really that informative? I was slightly idealist the first time I took the test, and slightly less than halfway leftist. This time I’m almost 2/3 leftist and slightly pragmatist.

Anyway, both are a good step in the right direction - that is, away from a simple left/right divide, which leaves out a lot of detail. All in all, one’s political views are a lot more nuanced than either of these analyses can show. For instance, I’m very much a social libertarian, but very much a Green leftie as well, which means that I believe that markets should be regulated with respect to environmental issues and workers’ rights… which sounds authoritarian doesn’t it? All in all, I’m still happier saying I’m a “left-libertarian” (or “green-left-libertarian-feminist-atheist”? Ah… yes well, sometimes too much detail is just silly) than a “left-slightly-more-pragmatic-rather-than-idealist”.

Thanks to Mr Stross’s LiveGerbil for this’un.

One Response to “Political Survey”

1. Ms .45 says:
   January 17th, 2004 at 3:19 am

   I got the same score as this Charles Kennedy person. Also, I found a few of the answers kinda unsatisfying - there’s no option for “depends” so I ended up putting “no opinion”, which makes me sound way more wishy washy than I am. Also, I was about as left wing as I expected, but I’d have thought I was a fair bit more pragmatic. I tend to think of myself as “disgruntled-ALP-voter-forced-to-vote-Green”.