fling93 loves fishies

Political Compass

As most of you on the blogosphere already know, Tim Lambert has gathered a chart of where all the bloggers line up on the Political Compass, which measures where you are on a two-dimensional scale from Liberal to Conservative economically, and also on a scale from Authoritarian to Libertarian.

My results:

Economic Left/Right: 2.12
Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.90

Putting me slightly to the right of center, but quite Libertarian. However, I sometimes drift closer to the middle economically (I once tested as slightly liberal at -.38).

Most people seem to believe the quiz/chart is skewed to make people seem more libertarian than they really are. Well, my impression is that individuals tend to be more libertarian than politicians. Even in our relatively free country, power is concentrated in the two parties, both of which can concentrate mostly on the left/right scale and pretty much ignore the Libertarian/Authoritarian question altogether (I'll write a future post on electoral reform which would addess this). So I think the quiz is probably not as biased as people think.

Personally, I like the concept, but it seems somewhat incomplete. Liberal and Conservative don't apply to only economics, but also to social issues. The quiz assumes the only angle to social issues is whether the government should get involved or not. Perhaps that's the only answer that matters to most people discussing public policy, but I think a better picture of a person's political views would include a third dimension to indicate their stance on where society should be, regardless of whether they think the government should play any role in moving society in that direction. After all, the traditional definition of Liberal (and Progressive) is to believe our society needs to update its values to become fairer for all, whereas Conservatives believe the biggest social problem is that our society changed its values too much and should return to more traditional values. Note, this third dimension would distinguish Pro-Choice people who believe abortion is always morally wrong (but that the government shouldn't interfere) from those who do not believe it is always wrong. Ditto on issues for gay sex, drug use, pornography, etc.

Even more reason to move to an electoral system that supports more than two parties, which I think is the real lesson to be learned from Political Compass in the first place.