Tag Archives: political compass

Political Compass Revisited

The primary season inspired me to revisit a couple political compass quizzes. Here are the results.

    Original Political Compass

      old scores

    • Left/Right: -4.75
    • Libertarian/Authoritarian: -1.44
      new scores

    • Economic Left/Right: -0.62
    • Libertarian/Authoritarian: -2.97
    Chris Lightfoot’s Political Compass

      old scores

    • Left/Right: -2.5683
    • Idealism/Pragmatism: -5.2243
      new scores

    • Left/Right: -0.0344
    • Pragmatism: -0.6670

Holy centrist, Batman!

Political Compass Redux

[compass0.png]

A while back I asked my readers to take a political quiz and report their results. I’ve taken those results and plotted them. Bear in mind that they only represent my readers. I’m not looking to replicate a blogosphere-wide map. If you’re one of my readers and you’d like to be on this map, take the quiz and leave a comment with your coordinates.

Addendum 11/27/05: I thought perhaps some readers might be interested in posting their coordinates from this quiz as well. Notice the linear dependecy of y on x in the first quiz? Well, this quiz corrects for that. Be sure to give your unnormalized scores.

[compass_lightfoot0.png]

IPIP-NEO/Political Compass Meme

IMPORTANT: If you came here because I emailed you about this meme, you should know that I’ve modified it. I was pretty psyched about the idea, but a friend of mine convinced me that it could backfire in its original form. Specifically:

"Originally, I was going to do the IPIP-NEO/Political Compass Meme. Ales Rarus passed it along as a fun idea. I think the originator of the meme was well-intentioned. But as I typed in my IPIP-NEO results, I became concerned. The IPIP-NEO is a psychological inventory test. I don’t know it’s validity. I’m not going to bother to look up it’s validity because whether it’s valid or not, I don’t want someone having access to ‘my’ results."

"Do I want a prospective employer Googling those results? If they’re not accurate, they could cost me a job. If they are accurate, I want that prospective employer to justify his need for them and then leave the decision to me. Putting them on the net is a bad idea, at least for me. I suspect it’s a universally bad idea."

I’m indebted to my friend for pointing this out. Rather than bag the whole thing, however, I’ve deleted my sub-section scores and only left the main section scores (I’ve left the political coordinates, though.). Perhaps the research possiblities for the meme are reduced that way, but people, including me, ought to feel safer. Without further ado, here’s the slightly modified IPIP-NEO/Political Compass Meme.

This is a cool meme that I think is worth passing on.

"The idea of a Go-meme (which I owe to Nova Spivack) is that it involves a ‘track list’ at the end of the post, rather like an extended hat-tip, with links to those who passed on the meme ‘upstream’ of you. This allows us to track the meme’s propagation through blog-space: just search google for your GUID (global unique identifier – it should be a short string that currently yields no results in a google search) to find all those who subsequently picked up the meme ‘downstream’ from you. It also provides an incentive to join the meme, so as to receive all those bonus links."

"To enhance the information value of the [IPIP-NEO personality test] data that this meme produces, I’ve added a few demographic questions, plus the two dimensions assessed by the Political Compass quiz. I think it would be especially interesting to learn if there are any correlations between particular personality traits and political or religious positions." [emphasis mine]

On a side note, If you decide to take the Political Compass quiz, please leave a comment with your score. I’d like graph the political leanings of my readers. If that turns out as well as I hope, I’ll post the results and hopefully other bloggers will inspired to do likewise. You also might wish to submit your coordinates to the Blogosphere Political Compass Project.

The Blogosphere Political Compass Project is graphing the approximate political affiliation of bloggers from all corners of the Internet. The chart below shows the relative positions of the bloggers who have responded thus far; graphing is done two-dimensionally in order to show both economic (liberal vs. conservative) and social (authoritarian vs. libertarian) leanings.

I’ve added Chris Lightfoot’s improvement upon the Political Compass quiz (on which I scored left/right: -2.568 and pragmatism/idealism: -5.2243) to the meme. If you give me a score for that test, I’ll map it as well.

OK. Enough hype.

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Questionable Questions

The Smedley Log links to a political compass test. It’s based on the Libertarian Party’s "World’s Smallest Political Quiz". I promised a while back to not link to any quizzes for a while, so you might be scratching your heads at this post. Well, I’m not going suggest that everyone go take the test. I’m writing about it because I don’t like the way some of the questions are worded. There are a lot of instances of assumption, innuendo, and leading.

"I’d always support my country, whether it was right or wrong."

"Support" is a rather vague word in this context. A parent should always support his child, right or wrong. That doesn’t mean children should never be punished. Patriotism does not have to mean turning a blind eye to mistakes made by our country and those who represent it.

"The rich are too highly taxed."

Agreeing with this statement would seem to indicate that one favors the rich, ala the Republican Party. That may not be the case. For instance, I think the tax shelters and loopholes should be closed so that the rich wouldn’t have to be in a higher bracket to be taxed more. If there were fewer tax exemptions, a flat tax could easily replaced the revenue our current system generates.

"Abortion, when the woman’s life is not threatened, should always be illegal."

The wording of this question implies that only pro-choice folks will disagree. However, a staunch pro-lifer might disagree on the basis that there is no good reason for abortion.

"All authority must be questioned."

Questioning need not imply disobedience. In matters lacking obvious moral implications, one should understand why leaders do what they do before rejecting their authority. Serious breaches of morality, however, may require immediate disobedience.

An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

Most people take this to mean retributive justice. However, scriptural context reveals it be referring to proportionate justice. In other words, the focus is not on taking no less than equivalent action, but rather on taking no more.

"Schools should not make classroom attendance compulsory."

Is this about home schooling? What’s the context?

"Good parents sometimes have to spank their children, to teach them right from wrong."

"Have to" is a bit strong. Better: "Spanking is an acceptable means for teaching right and wrong to children."

"A significant advantage of a one-party state is that it avoids all the arguments that delay progress in a democratic political system."

At a strictly factual level, this may indeed be true. I think the best possible form of government is a benevolent monarchy. Since human nature makes that impossible, representative democracy is the best we can do. Also, progress is not always a good thing. Our legislative process was designed to be slow so wide swings of the pendulum and/or rash decisions might be avoided. Agreement with this statement would seem to be tacit support for either communism or fascism, which it need not.

"In a civilised society, one must always have people above to be obeyed and people below to be commanded."

I don’t think human nature would allow to be any other way. Someone must have final authority, if for no other reason than to break ties.

"Charity is better than social security as a means of helping the genuinely disadvantaged."

People volunteering to help the disadvantaged would be ideal, but since most people won’t, they must be helped by some other means. That doesn’t mean I think social security should be abolished.

"No one can feel naturally homosexual."

Disagreeing with this statement should not be the same as approving of homosexual behavior.