Why is that?

Yes, but I don't really post in this forum.

5.5/-6.92



Surprised I'm not even further libertarian on the social scale.

Probably quite a few people who would end up in the top left with their pro-government nanny state views if the poll was designed properly.

I got -5.75 / -7.03 but yeah this is garbage. My problems with it are very different from yours though. These types of questionaires tend to miss much more relevant questions entirely;

1) How much you care about any given issue and which issues are important to you and which ones you don't care about, but happen to know what the right thing to say about them. The vast majority of people don't care about more than a few issues and a large majority don't care that much about any issue. This is true even of lots of "well-informed" partisans - most of their views aren't deeply held convictions, but surface-level identification based on their social needs.

2) Pragmatism vs idealism - the willingness to compromise to get things done. This tends to be weakly correlated with how much you care. Contrary to what people might think, for most normal people on most normal things, the more you care, typically the more you're willing to compromise. It's much easier to be inflexibly ideological when your beliefs aren't motivated by the desire to see concrete change. With that said, politics is driven by extremes so those that are both inflexibly single-minded and care to an extreme extent about an issue could disproportionately alter the course of history.

Phone Booth: good points! I probably should have said that I have at least two issues...


It's funny, last night I was sort of randomly thinking it would be fun to try to design a political typology survey, and one of the things I was thinking about was something like a "social identity" component, along the lines of your last sentence. I think this is one area where the age of the survey makes it stale. When I mentioned that, most of what I had in mind was that topical questions tend to just index identity in the way you're describing. I think that's a useful dimension, just not an all-important one.

I think you're right about needing a way to rank relative importance as well, although I was thinking that Likert scales could help tease that out.

I'm pretty hardcore ancap, but I haven't posted here in years. I found this test to be pretty weird; I would have expected to get a much more extreme score on a test like this.

I meant in this forum as the then posted results showed. Now the answer is yes. I believe that so far I am the poster that has posted the closest to the center. IIRC I rarely strongly agreed or disagreed with any of the questions, probably only replied strongly to questions regarding the bill of rights I am guessing.

Your Political Compass
Economic Left/Right: 2.75
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -0.46

Your Political Compass

Economic Left/Right: -5.63
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.49

This is one of the more insightful paragraphs I've seen recently in this forum.

It is, and not his first.

The difference between a real progressive and a centrist is that the real progressive compromises from a radical policy position. The aim is to maximise progress and maximise compromise from the other side. Engagement with the other side is also required.

Presumably, a big reason the test results aren't that different is simply because the vast majority of politically inclined people don't disagree nearly as much as they think they do.

Definitely so around these parts. One of the really odd things has been the culture of treating pretty moderate people as evil extremists of some sort.

It occurred to be when I attended a residents meeting last year which ended with a short friendly political chat, that pretty much all of them would be considered as beyond the pale by the old P crowd. And it was very good mix of people - not remotely an all white, male, christian or even british group. In reality they were pretty much all moderate people who would have been in or near the bottom left quarter of this test.

Not a fan of some of the really black/white nature of some of the questions.

Left / right = -.13
Authoritarian/libertarian = -4.31

Both pretty accurate.. I’m an independent who’s anti government