The Political Compass

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

This article is about the website. For the concept, see Political spectrum.

The Political Compass
Type of site
Political self-test, political blog
Available inEnglish, Bulgarian, Czech, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Turkish
Created byWayne Brittenden[1]
EditorWayne Brittenden[1]
URLpoliticalcompass.org
CommercialNo
RegistrationNo
Launched20 December 2001 (2001-12-20)[2]
Current statusActive

Overview

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
Version of a political compass as 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.[1] In economic terms, the political left is defined as the desire for the economy to be run by a cooperative collective agency, which can mean a sovereign state but also a network of communes, while the political right is defined as the desire for the economy to be left to the devices of competing individuals and organizations.[10] The test's propositions lead the individual undertaking the test to wonder about things like "Is military action that defies international law sometimes justified?", "Should mothers have demanding careers?", "If economic globalisation is inevitable, should it primarily serve humanity or multinational corporates?"[11]

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, colour marked quadrants: authoritarian left (red 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".[12] For the test's propositions, four options are available: "strongly agree", "agree", "disagree", and "strongly disagree".[7]

Criticism and alternatives

The website does not explain its scoring system.[13] Several writers, such as Tom Utley and Brian Patrick Mitchell, have criticised its validity.[7][8] Several other multi-axis models of the political spectrum include some based on similar axes to The Political Compass, most famously the Nolan Chart, developed by David Nolan, an American libertarian. A similar chart appeared in 1970 in The Floodgates of Anarchy by Albert Meltzer and Stuart Christie,[14] and in 1968 in the Rampart Journal of Individualist Thought by Maurice C. Bryson and William R. McDill.[15]

r/PoliticalCompassMemes is a subreddit dedicated to humorous criticism of ideologies, where users identify their ideologies with user flairs based on The Political Compass.[16]: 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.[16]: 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.[17]

See also

References
  1. LiCalzi O'Connell, Pamela (4 December 2003). "Online Diary". The New York Times. Retrieved 14 July 2023.
  2. "PoliticalCompass.org – WHOIS, DNS, & Domain Info – DomainTools". WHOIS. Retrieved 25 December 2020.
  3. "Shut Up, I'm A Libertarian". The Guardian. 11 July 2001. Retrieved 9 January 2018.
  4. "The Political Compass – Frequently Asked Questions – 29". PoliticalCompass.org. Retrieved 12 July 2023.
  5. "The Political Compass – Contact Us". The Political Compass. 11 October 2013. Retrieved 1 November 2013.
  6. "Pace News Limited". OpenCorporates.com. Retrieved 9 January 2018.
  7. Utley, Tom (6 June 2001). "I'm v. Right-wing, says the BBC, but it's not that simple". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 14 July 2023. 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. Mitchell, Brian Patrick (2007). Eight Ways to Run the Country. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 143. ISBN 978-0-275-99358-0.
  9. "The Political Compass – Crowd Chart". PoliticalCompass.org. 11 October 2013. Retrieved 1 November 2013.
  10. "The Political Compass – Frequently Asked Questions – 16". PoliticalCompass.org. Retrieved 12 July 2023.
  11. Dasgupta, Sucheta (27 August 2022). "Welcome to the political compass' third dimension". Deccan Chronicle. Retrieved 12 July 2023.
  12. "The Political Compass – Frequently Asked Questions – 20". PoliticalCompass.org. Retrieved 12 July 2023.
  13. ""The Political Compass – Frequently Asked Questions – 25". PoliticalCompass.org. Retrieved 8 January 2017. Can you provide your scoring details[?] ... [W]e have a strict policy against releasing this information.
  14. Christie, Stuart; Meltzer, Albert (1970). "Party Lines and Politics". The Floodgates of Anarchy. Binghamton, New York: PM Press. ISBN 0-900707-03-8. Retrieved 14 July 2023 – via The Anarchist Library.
  15. Bryson, Maurice C.; McDil, William R. (Summer 1968). "The Political Spectrum: A Bi-Dimensional Approach" (PDF). Rampart Journal of Individualist Thought. Santa Ana, California: Rampart College. 4 (2): 19–26. Retrieved 14 July 2023 – via Mises Institute.
  16. Anantharama, Nandini; Angus, Simon D.; Kitchener, Michael; Raschky, Paul A. (2022). "Predicting Political Ideology from Digital Footprints". arXiv:2206.00397 [econ.GN].
  17. 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 14 July 2023.
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