The Political Compass The above website was first brought to my attention by my AP. US Government teacher in high school. He strongly urged us to consider the issues beyond simply left and right. In reality political views are not so two-dimensional as we think (especially in America with our two party system, one "left" and one "right"). Check out this website and see where you fall on a four point spectrum. I really think it will help many people more accurately understand their own and others point of view. I, for example, oppose both new economic and moral controls by the government most of the time. A republican opposes economic controls and heartily approves of moral controls most of the time. This is an authoritarian attitude. It's not just the democrats who want big government, they only want it in a different way. I do of course want to admit some of the things that may not be perfect about this survey, and it does get people wrong sometimes. The main point is the compass, not the guess about where you fall.
almost an exact graph point match for Nelson Mandela but, yes, quite a few of the questions were bogus "the freer the market, the freer the people" ? ? ? define free market please define free people please
It seems like an inferior ripoff of the Nolan Chart. And the questions it asks are sort of like the related World's Smallest Political Quiz, except with the straightforward questions replaced with ambiguous ones. In particular, the Political Compass's questions about "society" aren't very helpful, since you can dislike aspects of society without thinking that government should do something about them. For example, they think the bottled water question tells them something about what you think about regulation, but it doesn't. -=Steve=-
I do agree that many of these type of tests are ambiguous - I've taken a number of different ones, and I get a very different answer on each one. Anything from "left-libertarian" to "more fascist than Mussolini".
I used a similar quiz this year in my PLS 211 US Government course. My purpose was to get my students to actually think. So many of them (mind you, these are high school seniors) simply say they are Party A or Party B because of their parents. However, when asked questions about their beliefs, many of them do not actually align with their parties. Some of them are amazed at the results, and I think this is such a good revelation. -Matt
What I found interesting about this one was that it considers global and historical definitions. It points out that a result where one is (for example) "conservative" may not be accurate in the context of a single country or time in history. Many American moderates are likely to be pegged as conservative in this survey if my understanding is correct.
This is to Steve specifically in reference to this thread and the Beck thread: Although the political compass doesn't put it this way I think of conservatism as small government no matter the situation (eg. economic vs social). This may be more of an American connotative view than anything else (although our republican party doesn't see it that way, it has authoritarian social tendencies in my view), but when I say I'm "very conservative" that's what I am trying to say. I think the government is essentially the biggest scariest political interest group/corporation/big and scary (insert here) I can think of. My views are based on a pessimistic assumption that government could do great things but it never will. It COULD make our lives better, but it wont. It ought to be able to run health care without falling into wasteful and ethically dubious practices, but I doubt it. This makes me very sympathetic to people who are more optimistic than I am as their solution would be better if it works. It reminds me of King vs Malcolm X. In that time period I would have thought that X was being more pragmatic and his solution (economic warfare, essentially) would have been more likely to work. Thankfully King's idealism won out in the end, but I would have never expected it. I can acknowledge that my pessimism is sometimes wrong, so I await the result of the recent political changes with a small glimmer of hope, but mostly expectations of serious issues. That's also why I hate people like Beck who imply (or sometimes outright say) the president is trying to destroy the country of liberals are stupid. They are simply more optimistic than we, if people like Limbaugh aren't simply pessimistic of governments ability to solve things, than I suspect greedy self-motivation as opposed to genuine desire for the good of the country. Does that make any sense? I'm afraid most people simply don't get the way I see things. Like B4 they see me as a contradiction. I think the very best way to look at government is that it exists for upholding freedom, if we consider it a tool for the common good we almost always wind up with tyranny.
I found the test rather interesting, especially in some of the questions it asked. I've always considering myself Middle Right... There's a good number of things I agree with on the Conservative level. (Note that doesn't mean I agree with things that the GOP is pushing. In fact, I recently wrote them and told them to take my name off the GOP mailing list and register until they stop making asses out of themselves, the party and the country. ) I do, in fact, believe in what might be a text book description of the conservative values (as follows) I got that definition from The Student News Daily As I read down the conservative column, there's only a few things that I intrinsically disagree with... The stance on abortion, the homeland security section (I'm opposed to the patriot act, as the next paragraph states) Same-Sex Marriage (Everyone should have the right to be miserable <Grin> )... The Wars... Eh.. I would have liked better planning and swifter resolution with a bit of common sense... Even if we make the rest of the world a glass parking lot, we'll still have citizens that won't like things and bam suddenly they're the terrorists. The war on terrorism is a war without end, unless there's only 1 man left standing on the planet. Unfortunately, I just feel as if the GOP of today isn't trying to move forward with ANY of those except for the strong national defense. I believe the patriot act is a horrendous mistake. And like it or not, compare the amount of deaths from terrorist activites over the last 20 years to something like say... Car accidents on American roads or the deaths cause from malnutrition in the states. I'm so disillusioned by the American political process today. Its all one big corrupt power & money-grab. So, on the political compass site, I ended up being on the left of the vertical access by a hair, and 1 measure down towards libertarian... Go figure.
I'm American also, and I don't agree that a typical understanding of conservatism means less government in all areas. Those authoritarian social tendencies are part of the package. For example, conservatism includes a sense of nationalism that leads to government action like immigration limitations. It also includes a willingness to use government to control the moral behavior of its citizens, as with bans on prostitution, drugs, buying alcohol on Sunday, flag burning, and so forth. All of these policies are conservative, yet all mean bigger government. To be skeptical that government can improve the lives of individuals better than those individuals could themselves is hardly pessimism! On the contrary, I'd call it a refreshing optimism for the capability of the individual! Wait, do you mean the huge subsidy for health insurance companies that's being touted as health care reform? I would agree with you that everyday progressives don't advocate big government because they specifically want to harm the economy or anything like that. I know they have good intentions -- I used to be one when I was a teenager. But when it comes to high ranking politicians and bureaucrats, I think that they're almost universally self-serving and tainted from compromise with those with enough money and influence to propel their careers. But that's an equal-opportunity disdain for members of the political class, whether progressive, centrist, or conservative. And yet the irony is that government is the greatest threat to freedom. Talk about the fox guarding the chicken coop! -=Steve=-
Wow, both good posts! Steve, we seem to see fairly eye-to-eye for the most part; however, I do not share your optimism concerning individuals. Rather, I am fearful that there is no solution. I'm glad we agree on issues like nationalistic and authoritarian tendencies of our allegedly "small government" party. TMW: We see surprisingly near each others point of view. A surprise for me given our past differences . And of all our agreements may I strongly come in on your side concerning the patriot act. That kind of unbridled power is going to destroy us. And a confession, I was down near the bottom of the political compass, more than half-way, but it did render me one notch to the left. This surprised and slightly upset me. I believe it had something to do with many of the conservative questions being superlatives "such and such is always true". To those I nearly always answered "NO!" even if I really agreed in principle. I'm going to take the test again and read out the superlatives and see what I come up with then.
I tried the "world's smallest political quiz" and didn't like it very much. The 1st half was fine, the 2nd half was a very radical set of ideas that I would support on a smaller scale. Many of questions seem to suggest total elimination of certain things rather than scaling back. namely, the social security question, the international trade question, and both welfare questions. Also I think it's safe to say that the 50% reduction of spending is not just conservative, it's fairly radical. To disagree in favor of a 20-30% reduction (for example) still makes you a conservative. So unless you are for some pretty hard-line positions this test will peg you as liberal. The 1st half of the test was quite reasonable.
Hehe... RJ, you must remember though... Our disagreements were on matters of scholastic implementation and expectations... A far cry from the political arena.
Tests like this often look to me like they are politically loaded. They word their questions in such a way as to guide respondents towards desired conclusions. Sometimes opinion polls suffer from similar defects. I guess that in some cases it's unconscious, since the person who wrote the test might hold a stereotypical view of the opposition and describe their views in extreme and subtly caricatured ways. Other times it's knowing and entirely intentional. Some of the tests probably hope to convince people that their views aren't really so dissimilar from those of (insert favorite cause here), so maybe people should give that cause a new look.
Perhaps it might have been better if their option between yes and no was "sort of" rather than "maybe"? The idea is that you're not going to end up on the very end of an axis unless you really hold those positions to the maximum degree, so if you would cut the federal budget by 20% but probably not more, then fair enough, but there are 80% worth of positions that are more conservative or libertarian than that. -=Steve=-
I think this test is to convince people who are economically conservative that they are actually somewhat liberal and need to rethink their views in a more radical way. So, essentially, I think you're right. Also, the world's smallest political quiz is run by a libertarian website. TMW: I can't even remember exactly what the problem was.
