Renzatic on 17/8/2018 at 21:39
The site itself says that it's harder to peg specifics in this day and age, due to the fact that there's a considerable amount of blurring between the various ideologies. Because of such, Person A landing in the same grid space as Person B doesn't show that these two people share the exact same politics, only that their respective ideologies have a goodly amount of overlap.
In short, it's messy, but it works as a quick and dirty generalization.
Starker on 18/8/2018 at 00:57
First, the left-right scale is not about social attitudes, it's about economy. Think communism vs neoliberalism. Bernie may seem far left in the US context, but his proposals for free college, expansion of health care, etc, are not really much different from what western democracies have been doing for a while now.
Secondly, it's not about public positions, it's about voting history, planned policies, and actions. By 2012, Obama had done some pretty authoritarian things by extending Bush's policies and keeping Guantanamo open and killing Osama without a trial (no matter how much he deserved it, I hope you'll agree that it's a pretty authoritarian act). You'll notice that Obama was considerably less authoritarian in 2008. But even then, he supported things like the death penalty and US politics lean more authoritarian and more right by default in the current political climate (e.g. being okay with a surveillance state and idealising capitalism).
Also, Macron did have something of a libertarian bent, from what I read about him. By US style I assume they mean he's a right wing libertarian, not a left wing one. No idea what the jab about him being the candidate closest to social Darwinism is supposed to be about. A jab at libertarianism, maybe?
Finally, this is not meant to be a tool for detailed political analysis. Think about it -- would two axes really be sufficient for that? It's about leanings, not accurately pinpointing someone's policies. It is
meant to be something of a caricature.
They actually do address some of those things in their (
https://www.politicalcompass.org/faq) FAQ:
Quote:
Why don't you collect statistics and report on test results?
It is important to us — and most of our respondents — that the test remains anonymous, and purely for personal information. If we were to log anyone's results, those results would have to be given voluntarily. This would mean that our sample would be self-selected, and therefore not statistically valid.
In other words, such data would tell us nothing about the political position of a particular population; it would only tell us about the type of person who volunteered to have their result recorded.
Trials have revealed that a wildly disproportionate number of visitors from particular cultures, and of certain age and socio-economic groups, were more willing than others to opt in.
Quote:
How can you determine where politicians are honestly at without asking them?
How can you tell where they're honestly at by asking them? Especially around election time. We rely on reports, parliamentary voting records, manifestos ... and actions that speak much louder than words. It takes us a great deal longer than simply having the politician take the test — but it's also a far more accurate assessment. In our early experience, politicians taking the test often responded in ways that conflicted with their actions but conformed to the prevailing mood of the electorate.
We are occasionally asked about publishing the individual responses of politicians. We frown on this. The propositions are too vague to be considered statements of policy, and the individual responses are not significant in themselves. When summed to give an economic and social score, however, they provide an accurate profile of a mental state.
Oh, and it looks they do use the term social Darwinism as a critique of right wing Ayn Randian libertarianism:
Quote:
(
https://www.politicalcompass.org/analysis2)
The usual understanding of anarchism as a left wing ideology does not take into account the neo-liberal “anarchism” championed by the likes of Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman and America's Libertarian Party, which couples social Darwinian right-wing economics with liberal positions on most social issues. Often their libertarian impulses stop short of opposition to strong law and order positions, and are more economic in substance (ie no taxes) so they are not as extremely libertarian as they are extremely right wing. On the other hand, the classical libertarian collectivism of anarcho-syndicalism ( libertarian socialism) belongs in the bottom left hand corner.
Draxil on 18/8/2018 at 03:06
Disclaimer: I thought the test was biased from the start, in that the assumptions in the questions seemed designed to put me on the defensive. My results:
Inline Image:
https://www.politicalcompass.org/analysis2?ec=4.0&soc=-0.31edit: dammit, I can't figure out how to post the result. I was x+4, y-0.31.
demagogue on 18/8/2018 at 03:39
I ignored the actual wording and translated the questions to more open-minded versions of what they were really asking. That put me further right and maybe up than I probably would have been without doing that. I think that's the better way to take that kind of test. It itself could be overly biased, but the person taking it themselves can try to be unbiased and account for and counteract the bias they can detect.
There's probably a good lesson for life in that, not to mention the OP topic at hand. If people could filter bullshit and bias better and get to the nub of an issue, they can avoid getting sunk into some useless battle of emotions. The major catch, of course, is that you can't typically expect your opponent is going to play along.
Starker on 18/8/2018 at 03:50
From the FAQ:
Quote:
Some of the questions are slantedMost of them are slanted! Some right-wingers accuse us of a leftward slant. Some left-wingers accuse us of a rightward slant. But it's important to realise that this isn't a survey, and these aren't questions. They're propositions — an altogether different proposition. To question the logic of individual ones that irritate you is to miss the point. Some propositions are extreme, and some are more moderate. That's how we can show you whether you lean towards extremism or moderation on the Compass.
The propositions should not be overthought. Some of them are intentionally vague. Their purpose is to trigger buzzwords in the mind of the user, measuring feelings and prejudices rather than detailed opinions on policy.
Incidentally, our test is not another internet personality classification tool. The essence of our site is the model for political analysis. The test is simply a demonstration of it.
Quote Posted by Draxil
edit: dammit, I can't figure out how to post the result. I was x+4, y-0.31.
Inline Image:
https://www.politicalcompass.org/chart?ec=+4&soc=-0.31Aja on 18/8/2018 at 04:11
I scored bottom left, but I'm really more of a communist than a libertarian.
Renzatic on 18/8/2018 at 05:12
Bottom left? That's, like, Star Trek society, man.
[ATTACH=CONFIG]2497[/ATTACH]
Aja on 18/8/2018 at 14:04
There were no questions like, “Do you think health care, university, and a basic income should all be free?”, which no good libertarian would agree with but I sure do.
Starker on 18/8/2018 at 14:17
I guess it is really rather different to how people are used to thinking about these terms, but under their model, libertarian is a social dimension, not an economic one. Market-based healthcare and education and no minimum wage would be to the right of the chart, not to the bottom.
I think this chart might make things a bit clearer, perhaps:
Inline Image:
https://www.politicalcompass.org/images/axeswithnames.gifAlso, from the FAQ:
Quote:
You've got liberals on the right. Don't you know they're left?
This response is exclusively American. Elsewhere neo-liberalism is understood in standard political science terminology — deriving from mid 19th Century Manchester Liberalism, which campaigned for free trade on behalf of the capitalist classes of manufacturers and industrialists. In other words, laissez-faire or economic libertarianism.
In the United States, “liberals” are understood to believe in leftish economic programmes such as welfare and publicly funded medical care, while also holding liberal social views on matters such as law and order, peace, sexuality, women's rights etc. The two don't necessarily go together.
Our Compass rightly separates them. Otherwise, how would you label someone like the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan who, on the one hand, pleased the left by supporting strong economic safety nets for the underprivileged, but angered social liberals with his support for the Vietnam War, the Cold War and other key conservative causes?
SlyFoxx on 18/8/2018 at 14:47
Quote Posted by Aja
There were no questions like, “Do you think health care, university, and a basic income should all be free?”, which no good libertarian would agree with but I sure do.
You don't actually believe anything is "free" do you? See...socialism and communism only work until you run out of other people's money. It's amazing anybody still thinks it's a viable system.
