World’s Smallest Political Quiz

Go ahead, take the quiz and find out in about a minute where you are on the range. I scored squarely as a “Left-Liberals. Left-Liberals prefer self-government in personal matters and central decision-making on economics. They want government to serve the disadvantaged in the name of fairness. Leftists tolerate social diversity, but work for economic equality.” My Personal Self-Government Score is 80% and my Economic Self-Government Score is 40%. The quiz has been taken over 1.1 million times as of this writing, with my crowd running a poor third at 16.9%; not surprisingly for the Web, Libertarians are at the top with 38.1%. From the site’s FAQ: “Who produces the Quiz? The Quiz is produced by the Advocates for Self-Government, a non-profit, non-partisan libertarian educational organization.” The FAQ does make at least one good point: the old “linear” model of political beliefs (that is, from left to right) is outmoded. Bill’s additional opinion: When almost everyone, except the libertarian, is more or less characerizing themselves as a centrist we need a new model.

Political Compass is another site trying to popularize a new, more complex classification scheme for political views. There’s no real About Us page or detailed information on who’s behind the site except for this: “The idea was developed by a political journalist with a university counselling background, assisted by a professor of social history.” The only clue I could see is that a banner ad for an organization called One World Action is on every page, and One World Action is a group associated with the British Labour Party. [Pause while I take the test] Okay, well, just from the questions one would think this test was written by people left of center (to use the old, simpler classification). And it’s longer. Oddly, the last page, questions on sexual attitudes, are all questions that a liberal would answer Strongly Disagree except the last one (“What goes on in a private bedroom between consenting adults is no business of the state.”). I wonder if the sudden change of perspective throws the less careful off and skews the results. Anyway, my score was Economic Left/Right: 0.82, Authoritarian/Libertarian: -4.55; on their grid, barely to the right of center on economics and somewhat more towards libertarian on that axis. Just goes to confirm my belief as stated above.