Sunday 29 April 2007

Where do you sit politically?




















I recently found this website, www.politicalcompass.org/questionnaire, which proved to be very interesting. After answering a few questions, you can pin point where you are on a political graph (see image above). Not only does the scale tell you where you in the "old" terms of Left/Right, it also shows where you sit in terms of the Authoritarian/Libertarian scale. The rationale behind having a graph, instead of a straight-line scale makes sense. The traditional Left/Right line fails to take into account that we someone may have traditional left-leaning views when it comes to social liberty, for example, but still support a free market and a capitalist economy. And we can't put Stalin and Mandela in the same "Left" basket without acknowledging the massive differences between the two, namely Stalin was Authoritarian Left and Mandela Libertarian Left. Out of interest, when I did mine, I was right on Mandela's pin point.



Where our current crop of leaders falls is interesting. That George W Bush is way out there in "right field" shouldn't surprise anyone, but what did startle me was how many of our leaders are up in the Authoritarian Right (including our PM). Does this, I wonder, have any correlation to the fact we're all so gung-ho at the moment? That we've now engaged in another never-ending war?

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

5 comments:

ADHD Librarian said...

Looks like I'm a little to the right of you, but a bit more Libertarian.
(which it seems puts me in line with Gandhi) So, about midway between Mandela and a Llama. Which I don't mind because I quite like llamas.

Emma said...

so does this mean you're a closet anarchist?

john jensen said...

I was right in the middle of the bottom left. No surprise there, but I reject the accuracy of the test as many questions I could not answer in the way I would like, and many questions assumed things as well.

Emma, it means you need to stop talking to me, or else you'll become a subversive church planting artist type.

not that there is anything wrong with that :)

rev

Emma said...

ha ha

i'm fairly artistic anyway :)

Marcus Claxton said...

Me. I'm right about where Jacques Chirac is.