Thursday, February 12, 2009

Political Spectrum Quiz

Here's my political compass from the Political Spectrum Quiz. It's pretty accurate.

My Political Views
I am a right social libertarian
Right: 6.48, Libertarian: 3.67

Political Spectrum Quiz
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7 comments:

  1. DaleFebruary 12, 2009 at 5:41 PM

    I'm an almost exact mirror along the vertical axis -- 3.3 libertarian, 5.7 left.

    I know you were going to be unable to sleep tonight without knowing.

    Cheers.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Gherald LFebruary 12, 2009 at 6:07 PM

    I plotted mine over here along with US Democrat, Republican, and my age group.

    And I included the foreign policy and culture bars -- it might be interesting to see UNRR's ;P

    ReplyDelete
  3. UNRRFebruary 12, 2009 at 9:00 PM

    Dale,

    I do find varieties of views pretty interesting.

    Gherald,

    I guess i'd need to retake it in order to put up the two bars, but in case you couldn't tell, my foreign policy views are much more to the right than my social/cultural views.

    ReplyDelete
  4. FrodoSavesFebruary 13, 2009 at 3:29 AM

    Left: 2.36
    Libertarian: 2.58

    I think I would have ended up slightly more to the right if the foreign policy questions had covered a wider variety of situations. Hard to capture your position in a single sentence, eh?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Alon LevyFebruary 13, 2009 at 6:20 PM

    It's not that it's hard to capture. It's that the quiz is deliberately designed to make individual test-takers look more left-libertarian and politicians look more right-authoritarian (see takedown here). For example, the left-right questions focus on issues of corporate power instead of the more mundane and more divisive issues of taxes, development, and spending priorities. Similarly, the libertarian-authoritarian questions are overwhelmingly weighted toward values issues, on which most online test takers tilt further left than average.

    Let's look at your own score. I can accept that based solely on values issue, you're a -3.67 on a -10 to 10 scale. But you're also unapologetically hawkish on issues of national security, foreign policy, and civil liberties (with the exception of police brutality). Usually it's these hard power issues rather than values that correlate the best with voting right-wing.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Alon LevyFebruary 13, 2009 at 6:34 PM

    Okay, now I've realized that this is something different from the Political Compass. My first reading of the Political Spectrum is that it tilts libertarian:

    1. Like PC, PS concentrates on values issues, which make the test takers seem more liberal. Hard power issues have a greater role than on PC, but are still shafted.

    2. The foreign policy questions are too realist-oriented. Most hawkish voters don't think in terms of "protecting our supply of oil." That's not even how the neocons think.

    3. The quiz uses words like "state" way more often than any non-libertarian does.

    4. Many economic questions are about free market values, which most people are for, rather than about specific policies.

    5. The question about preferring one's own kind comes straight from intra-libertarian debates. Someone who had to deal with the Lew Rockwell types might put it just to show how crazy Rockwell's position is; someone who took his cues from mainstream discourse would put a statement like "There's no serious racial discrimination against minorities anymore."

    ReplyDelete
  7. Donna B.February 14, 2009 at 2:25 AM

    I've taken this test several times and always come within 1 of the cross on the right/libertarian side.

    I think I'm an incorrigible moderate.

    ReplyDelete

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