Law & Society Blog

This might be an old hat for some, but I was delighted to stumble upon the Political Compass survey website. I would have wished for a more detailed explanation of the methodology and the explanatory power of the questions, as they relate to the two axis right/left and authoritarian/libertarian. My impression is that most of the propositions are too high-level in that they are aiming directly at political positions (which shouldn’t be too surprising, given the name of the website). Thus, compared to the survival/self-expression and traditional/secular plane of the World Values Survey and the hierarchist/egalitarian, individualist/collectivist space of the Cultural Cognition project, that aim at mapping value commitments, which, among other things, help to predict political positions, their explanatory power is likely to be limited. That said, any model of the political space that helps us overcome the simplistic and deeply misleading one-dimensional left/right (two party) dichotomy, is a welcome addition to the discourse. By way of disclosure, my economic left/right score was -3.5 and my social libertarian/authoritarian score -6.82, which would make me a left-leaning libertarian. Based on a sample size of one, I can vouch for the accuracy of the test.

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