The Political Compass – Wikipedia

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Political self-test

The Political Compass

Type of site

 Political self-test, political blog
Available in English, Bulgarian, Czech, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Turkish
Created by Wayne Brittenden[1]
Editor Wayne Brittenden[1]
URL politicalcompass.org
Commercial No
Registration No
Launched 20 December 2001; 21 years ago (2001-12-20)[2]
Current status Active

The Political Compass is a website soliciting responses to a set of 62 propositions, to rate political ideology in a spectrum with two axes: economic (left–right) and social (authoritarian–libertarian).[1]

Overview[edit]

The website does not reveal its owners, and it seems to be based in the United Kingdom.[3][4] At the bottom of its pages, the copyright is claimed as a trademark of Pace News Limited.[5] This company is registered in New Zealand and its director is political journalist Wayne Brittenden.[6] According to The New York Times, the site is the work of Brittenden.[1]

According to Tom Utley for The Daily Telegraph, the site is connected to One World Action, a charity founded by Glenys Kinnock.[7] An early version of the site was published on One World Action’s web server.[8]

Political model[edit]

This political compass is used by The Political Compass.[9]

The underlying theory of the political model used by The Political Compass is that political ideology may be better measured along two separate, independent axes. The economic (left–right) axis measures one’s opinion of how the economy should be run. “Left” is defined as the desire for the economy to be run by a cooperative collective agency, which can mean the state but also a network of communes, while “right” is defined as the desire for the economy to be left to the devices of competing individuals and organizations.[10]

The other axis (authoritarian–libertarian) measures one’s political opinions in a social sense, regarding the amount of personal freedom that one would allow. “Libertarianism” is defined as the belief that personal freedom should be maximised, while “authoritarianism” is defined as the belief that authority should be obeyed. This makes it possible to divide people into four quadrants: authoritarian left (marked by red and placed in the top left), authoritarian right (blue in the top right), libertarian right (yellow or purple in the bottom right), and libertarian left (green in the bottom left). The makers of the Political Compass say that the quadrants “are not separate categories, but regions on a continuum”.[11]

Criticism and alternatives[edit]

The website does not explain its scoring system.[12] Several writers have criticised its validity, including Tom Utley[7] and Brian Patrick Mitchell.[8]

Several other multi-axis models of political thought include some based on similar axes to The Political Compass, most famously the Nolan Chart, developed by the American libertarian, David Nolan. A similar chart appeared in 1970 in The Floodgates of Anarchy by Albert Meltzer and Stuart Christie and in 1968 in the Rampart Journal of Individualist Thought by Maurice C. Bryson and William R. McDill.[13][14][improper synthesis?]

In popular culture[edit]

PoliticalCompassMemes is a subreddit dedicated to humourous criticisism of ideologies, where users identify their ideologies with user flairs based on the Political Compass.[15]: 8  In June 2022, the subreddit was used in a study by researchers at Monash University to predict users’ political ideologies based on their digital footprints.[15]: 1  In July 2022, the subreddit attracted media attention for announcing that it would classify grooming claims against LGBTQ people as hate speech after Reddit administrators warned them to tone down their language.[16]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ a b c d LiCalzi O’Connell, Pamela (4 December 2003). “Online Diary”. The New York Times. Retrieved 2 August 2017.
  2. ^ “PoliticalCompass.org WHOIS, DNS, & Domain Info – DomainTools”. WHOIS. Retrieved 25 December 2020.
  3. ^ “Shut Up, I’m A Libertarian”, 11 July 2001 The Guardian. Retrieved 9 January 2018.
  4. ^ “FAQ Q29”. Politicalcompass.org. Retrieved 9 January 2018.
  5. ^ “The Political Compass”. The Political Compass. 11 October 2013. Retrieved 1 November 2013.
  6. ^ “Pace News Limited”. Opencorporates.com. Retrieved 9 January 2018.
  7. ^ a b Utley, Tom. “I’m v. Right-wing, says the BBC, but it’s not that simple”. The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 6 January 2017. A lot of the questions in the test are very irritatingly phrased and impossible to answer properly, with only these four options available: ‘strongly agree’, ‘agree’, ‘disagree’ and ‘strongly disagree.’
  8. ^ a b Mitchell, Brian Patrick. “Eight ways to run the country”. Greenwood Publishing Group. 2007. p. 143. ISBN 978-0-275-99358-0.
  9. ^ “The Political Compass”. The Political Compass. 11 October 2013. Retrieved 1 November 2013.
  10. ^ “The Political Compass”. www.politicalcompass.org.
  11. ^ “The Political Compass”. www.politicalcompass.org.
  12. ^ “The Political Compass FAQ #25”. politicalcompass.org. Retrieved 8 January 2017. Can you provide your scoring details[?] … [W]e have a strict policy against releasing this information.
  13. ^ Meltzer, Albert; Christie, Stuart (1970). “Party Lines and Politics”. The Floodgates of Anarchy. ISBN 0-900707-03-8.
  14. ^ Bryson, Maurice C.; McDil, William R. (Summer 1968). “The Political Spectrum: A Bi-Dimensional Approach” (PDF). Rampart Journal of Individualist Thought. 4 (2).
  15. ^ a b Kitchener, Michael; Anantharama, Nandini; Angus, Simon D.; Raschky, Paul A. (2022). “Predicting Political Ideology from Digital Footprints”. arXiv:2206.00397 [econ.GN].
  16. ^ Goforth, Claire (20 July 2022). “A political memes subreddit kicked off an internet-wide call to get baseless ‘groomer’ claims classified as hate speech”. The Daily Dot. Retrieved 4 January 2023.

External links[edit]