Political Compass

Finally the dice has been cast! We are through with the Greek national election and life can continue almost as usual.

Although politics can be a fascinating subject, I have never been a person involved heavily in politics. One of the reasons for that is that I could not full identify with any of the political parties. I like various ideas from all the range of political parties and similarly I dislike many ideas from all of them. As a result I could never say that I belong to the right-wing or the left-wing or the infamous middle.

One reason for that is that the single-axis categorization (left-middle-right) is too restrictive, if not outdated. So some people have started categorizing political beliefs on a two-axis system, where the horizontal axis represents your beliefs in the economic scale (ranging from Left to Right) and the vertical axis represents your beliefs in the social scale (ranging from Libertarian to Authoritarian).

One such test can be found on Political Compass.

It's an interesting and compelling test, requiring about 5 minutes of your time. In case you are interested to know, my results were as follows:

Economic Left/Right: -4.50
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -4.00

If you are a visual kind of person, here is the graph:

This means a kind of left on the economic scale, and kind of libertarian on the social scale, somewhere near Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Dalai Lama. I can't guarantee about the validity and objectivity of this test but I definitely like Gandhi, Mandela and Dalai Lama more that Bush, Thatcher, Stalin, Blair and the like, so it didn't score bad in my case.

Still I think that even such a two dimensional categorization is restrictive. I would rather prefer that various ideas were positioned on such a 2D plane and then I choose which ones I like and which I don't. Then I could see how my various beliefs are distributed on the 2D plane, and have a better idea of where I stand.

If you know of any other similar tests please let me know :-)

Have fun!

Comments

[adamo]

Hmm...

Economic Left/Right: -5.88
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.69

OTOH, http://www.theadvocates.org considers me as a left/liberal.