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Where are you on the political compass?

36 Comments

This fascinating short quiz will reveal where you are on the political compass.

compass.jpg

Political Compass is a simple interactive website that allows you to gauge your true political allegiance.

The old one-dimensional categories of ‘right’ and ‘left’, established for the seating arrangements of the French National Assembly of 1789, are overly simplistic for today’s complex political landscape. For example, who are the ‘conservatives’ in today’s Russia? Are they the unreconstructed Stalinists, or the reformers who have adopted the right-wing views of conservatives like Margaret Thatcher?

The survey reveals surprising results:

We see that New Labour, for example, is actually significantly to the right of the pre-Thatcher Conservative Party. As the centre of political gravity moves rightwards, the Liberal Democrats, who have held the most consistent ground, appear more left than in previous elections.

The test is entirely anonymous. See here

36 thoughts on “Where are you on the political compass?”

  2. I took the test last year, but I don’t think it’s changed much. I was just about equally left and libertarian (-5.62/-5.74) in line with Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, Gandhi and the Greens.

  4. Yay – I’m Gandhi and the Dalai Lama all rolled into one.
    I always knew Tony was a Tory…
    So which party am I supposed to vote for. Guess it’s the greens or somebody like that..

  5. There’s another specificallly UK site that does something similar called “Who Should I Vote For? ” – and according to the Times it’s getting 10% of all political traffic in the UK – better than any of the real parties sites. It told me I should vote Green, though I don’t think I will.
    Try it for yourself at……
    http://www.whoshouldyouvotefor.com/

  6. C’mon Boris, there’s a lack of poloiticians in the bottom-right quadrant, which is where I guess you are. If I show you mine (-6.88; -8.05) will you show us yours?

  7. I don’t like these comments.
    I thought that I was the only treehugging anarchist posting here, and all the rest were members of the Howard Youth. It appears that we are infested with liberal lefties.
    How come we are governed by the intolerant right?

  8. Ok, I’ve got a result as from Boris …

    An Anarchist/Libertarian inclining towards the Right Neo-Liberalism.
    The Lib Dems should be further off –
    (score was Economic left/right 2.13 and Social Libertarian/Authoritarian -0.82)

    Bottom right quadrant – you were right Dave Weeden!

  10. Sorry Vicus, look like we’re all here to subvert Boris and turn him into a hippy like us..
    Dunno why why we’re governed by the right. maybe we all know that although we’d like to be green, we like our cars too much to actually vote for them?

  12. Apparently I’m -1.5 a leftie, and -3.79 a liberal. I’m not surprised I’m a liberal but I’m surprised it thinks I’m to the economic left…

  14. Phil:

    The Political Compass website is run by some people in the US libertarian movement. Their economic axis is heavily skewed towards US norms – for example, the thought that an NHS might not be automatically bad is way out in the left field of US politics, but entirely normal in the UK.

    They also have a peculiar choice of wording for some of their questions – there is a question that asks somehting like “should the rich have a right to better healthcare”. The answer to that question is obviously “no” – there should be no such right. They should, of course, be free to purchase whatever healthcare is available, and it may turn out that that healthcare is better than that available to less well off people, but that’s not the same.

    I find that most of my friends (farly liberal, smallish-government free-market types) come out like you slightly in the libertarian left. I found that there were half-a-dozen or so questions where I thought that the answer to the question that I think the questionnaire intended was “agree” or “agree strongly”, but the answer to the question that was actually asked was “strongly disagree”.

  16. OK, I’ve taken a closer look at the “economy” questions again.

    We have questions like “It’s a sad reflection on our society that something as basic as drinking water is now a bottled, branded consumer product.”

    Frankly, that’s true. Given that what’s sold in bottles for a couple of quid a go is no different from most people’s tap water, it shows how bloody stupid people are. I think it’s sad that people are stupid. This isn’t a grumble about the economics at all – if you can make money by selling crap to idiots, then good luck to you – but probably ranks me as a screaming leftie.

  17. Economic Left/Right: 2.75
    Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: 1.18

    It’s only a rough comparison of two different graphs, but apparently of the Political Compass’ analysis of leading political figures, I’m closest to Paul Martin, the Canadian PM.

  18. I’m in the bottom right, L/R +1.63 and Lib/Auth -3.08. There sems to be a dearth of people on their charts in that quadrant (but nice that Boris is there)…

  19. Goodness, I am a Liberal Lefty (I always supposed I was) a tiny bit more liberal than Gandhi (-4.88 and -3.74)! But I don’t understand why when I did who should I vote for the answer was the UKIP or Green! Am I confused or these tests aren’t worth the band lengths they occupy?

  20. Vanessa – I would say look to your own local candidates and assess them personally. You may find that the Green and UKIP ones lack credibility in economic and power base terms.

  21. Chris – I liked the You Gov survey – very interesting on newspaper readership political inclinations

  22. Melissa, I know that the Green and UKIP are confused, not as much as the tests I did today. The problem is that while I am against the European Union as it is being forced upon us at the moment, and that I do care for the environment, that is not the only thing I ask from my MP.

  23. Did that Political Compass a few weeks back and was bottom right, but don’t remember the exact points.

    The rather more reliable whoshouldyouvotefor.com, however, I got something in the region of +65 Conservative and -55 Labour. Huzzah!

  25. I have also now done Chris Lightfoot’s similar political values test at:

    http://www.politicalsurvey2005.com/

    I am not sure how well this works. On one axis I was “very internationalist and rehabilitionist” (this is also a spelling test) at -5.1 with 93 per cent of the British people to my right, but on another axis I was only “slightly socialist and anti-war” at – 0.5 and I suppose fairly normal.

    What are other people’s results?

  27. The Times has prettified the ‘Political Compass’

    The Times has put a new version of the ‘Political Compass’ online. This time it has pretty pictures attached. The Times version is here Some of the questions didn’t give me a good option to answer, so was ‘best approximation’….

  28. The problem with Chris Lightfoot’s test is that is has an incredibly inaccurate BNP sample which he refuses to remove or even fix, so anyone who is not a socialist gets classified as BNP.

  29. Simon

    Top right quadrant – just in at about the Paul Martin score

    You are in the highly spiritual department Simon, well done!

  30. I had, what for me , was a surprising result: Left=-1
    Libertarian -0.65. (I had expected to be seen as a raving Right winger.) It was suggested that I vote Green, but I’ll not be yellow, and vote my normal Blue.
    I believe the original quiz was formulated to suit the American political scene.Was this the case?

  32. Melissa: ” . . . about the Paul Martin score”

    Exactly the position of the 1972 Conservatives. Congratulations and welcome back to the great Tory party of . . . Edward Heath! (Are you also a squash player, I wonder? That would be splendid.)

    “You are in the highly spiritual department”

    Thank you, that’s right. I am an atheist, but I’ve spent a lot of time in temples. Archaeologists can’t be superstitious, but I like romantic operas where the singers refer interminably to heaven, ‘O ciel, o ciel etc.’.

  33. Macarnie: ” I believe the original quiz was formulated to suit the American political scene. Was this the case?”

    The (anonymous?) author is stated to be ‘UK-based’, but he was obviously trying to make the test as widely applicable as possible. Almost anybody who runs a website (as opposed to a blog) will find that the majority of his/her readers are north American. In the case of my sites it’s about 80 per cent.

    He also offers to make localized versions to suit different countries. I would expect any test written by one person would have bias. In this case, there is perhaps a bias towards the bottom left quadrant.

  34. The questions are a little bit loaded, ie “should globalisation benefit corporations or the people?”

    This is to suggest that what is good for corporations isn’t good for the people, that one tends to benefit at the expense of the other, which is nonsense as anybody who has grasped the principles of Adam Smiths ‘invisible hand’ will know. (invisible hand eh? I can imagine where that would be useful ;-p)

    At the end when they show you where famous politicians would stand, they have Maggie Thatcher (a neo-liberal) right next to Hitler! (a totalitarian national socialist) rendering their entire spectrum inept.

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