Paul Evans discusses political compasses in this post from a couple of days ago. We at the Society took some initial steps down this road a few months back.

We wanted a feature on the site that would place users on a political map (rather than a simple graph). The map would show well known political figures and other users, so they could get a sense of where their political views lay.

We also wanted to find a helpful set of axes that reflected real differences in political view, rather than the obvious left/right split.

To do this we collected all the different axes we could find around the net and elsewhere, and my removing the obvious duplicates we came up with the following list:

• authoritarian - liberal
• conservative - socialist
• control - free expression
• interventionist - isolationist
• left - right
• nationalist - internationalist
• organic state - social contract
• rule of power - rule of law
• small government - big government
• tough minded - tender hearted
• traditionalist - modernist

We wanted to find out two things from our first piece of work. First, whether any of our ten remaining axes were seen as the same thing by the general public. Second, what position on the axes people would place others with particular political opinions.

We therefore set up a test on the website which presented a random political statement (from a list of about fifty), and a random axis. It then asked the participant to place someone who strongly agreed with the statement on the axis presented.

We had 2,500 answers at the end of the test, but when we took a look at them, it was hard to pick out definite results. For one thing, because of the number of questions and axes, 2,500 answers wasn’t enough to have each question answered for each axis more than four or five times. Some of the results were quite widely spread, as well.

You can find a 2.6Mb Excel spreadsheet with the full results here, and a PDF document with a short summary here.

My summary of what we learned is:

• You need to test axes for comprehension and to see whether people mean the same things by the same terms. This is one area where we can draw results from our survey.
• The left/right, big government/small government and conservative/socialist axes were pretty much identical, while the organic state/social contract axis didn’t seem to mean much to people.
• It’s much harder to use the web survey method to reach a political position for particular statements, taking into account differences in interpretation, the self-selection of users, existing political biases, mistakes and so on.

We’re still interested in pursuing a new political compass. I’d suggest from our axes the following shortlist:

• Either authoritarian/liberal or (because of the pollution of the word liberal in the US), control/free expression
• Intervention/isolation and nationalist/internationalist but only for questions with a foreign policy theme
• Rule of power/rule of law
• Tough minded/tender hearted and
• Small government/big government

I also like Paul’s suggestion of an idealist/pragmatist axis (which is how I’d interpret his idealist-cynic/not idealist axis), and possibly a solipsism axis as well - though here we’re getting towards psycho-sociology.

As for rating statements or answers on the axes, which you need to do to place users on them, that’s more difficult. I think, much as it goes against my instincts, that a panel made up of a balanced group of politically experienced people is probably better than just using answers from an open questionnaire.

As Paul says, the key is in the graphic that shows a wide range of people not agreeing with you. Rather like Douglas Adams’s Total Perspective Vortex (but hopefully less fatally) this provides a major dose of anti-groupthink corrective, and that’s something that would be very worthwhile.

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