h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The political compass is a highly simplified version of (what's known in psychology) as a Repertory Grid, used as an analytic tool in Personal Construct Theory:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_construct_psychology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repertory_grid

The basic idea is that we judge things in terms of bipolar scales: little-big; hot-cold; smooth-hairy; etc. These scales can be correlated with one another and hence boiled down to a a number of axes in n-dimensional space. So we can understand where peoiple are coming from by looking at where their thoughts and ideas fit according to these various axes.

A word of caution, though: Any set of axes will only account for part of the complexity (or 'variance') in a person's thought system. Most of us *kinda* understand the Left/Right distinction...but the reason it doesn't really fit is that it's vaguely associated with quite a few things. One interpretation I read recently is that the right is (broadly) concerned with the rights of property while the left is (broadly) concerned with the rights of humans. Of course this is complicated by the fact that human rights are also about material comfort.

Still - Left/Right mostly works. Sought of.

One of the best ways of judging people politically I've heard - I forget who from was:

'Of any man, I wish only to know the answer to one question: would he be happier to learn that an ancestor of his was on the side of the roundheads or the cavaliers.'

My version is whether, when young, you wanted to be a cowboy or an indian.

And, of course, the Left are those 'On The Side Of The Angels.'











I came across a useful set of axes recently:
The Swedish Dual Affect Scale.

It's a sort of repertory grid originating from psychiatric practice...but I've seen it used to measure workload in merchant seamen. A battery of questions was boiled down to:
- Are you busy or idle?
- Are you happy or unhappy about that?

ie you can have
- nothing to do and happy (resting)
- nothing to do and unhappy (bored)
- lots to do and happy (busy)
- lots to do and unhappy (stressed)

Here are my results:

Your political compass
Economic Left/Right: -4.75
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.23

Which puts me just to the right of Ghandi on the graph. Fair but with personal responsibility important.

Which is interesting as the questionaire last month about what is your European party put me as fairly right wing based on the fact that I don't agree with the current form of the European 'parliament/commission'.

Shows that depending on what questions you ask and the number of answering options you allow can affect the outcome.

Edward the Bonobo

Interesting as I had to answer in a way I wasn't too pleased with as I could *ahem* swing both ways on some of the questions depending on the situation.

So what that means is that you need more scales to get at the truth. The questions don't quite get at your feelings.

The Repertory Grid Technique is meant to be tailored to individuals, placeing stimuli that are relavant to them on scales of their own devising, Things like the political compass, which attempt to impose a unitary mental structure across a population, inevitably introduce huge variance.

"One interpretation I read recently is that the right is (broadly) concerned with the rights of property while the left is (broadly) concerned with the rights of humans."

I'd say in the post-war, Western world that makes some sort of sense. But the problem is that the right has a great deal of interests which persist including religious and social traditionalism/cohesion, nationalism and patriotism (of varying scales) and leftovers of its 18th and 19th century trad-statism before socialism made them more hostile (notably a respect for things like monarchy (where monarchy's exist), established churches and the military, the latter in particular).

As for the left being concerned about "the rights of humans", that's stretched a bit by certain Marxist-Leninists who regard individual human rights as unimportant (hence the infamous lack of human rights in Marxist-Leninist states).

They're all generalisations - it's like the ones that determine your leadership type (I'm a benign dictator) to make it managable they have to distill questions into fields they can measure against their chosen parameters.

Interesting test but many omissions or poorly defined areas of response.

There was no question about handguns. A pretty important x:y attitude.

Do I think that a one-party state has 'advantages' over a truly democratic one? ...of course, but those advantages are for 'the state' and not its citizens.
Do I think a one-party state is 'better' than a truly democratic one?
...of course not.

I'm right there (or West South West actually) with my old buddy Nelson. I bet everyone else here is too.

*runs off for a smoke, pausing only to beat his children*

alec.

>Do I think that a one-party state has 'advantages' over a truly democratic one? ...of course, but those advantages are for 'the state' and not its citizens.

That depends on what citizens and what advantages. I can't remember where it was but I remember someone (a conservative, I suspect) arguing that a dictatorship that defended property rights would be a Good Thing from their perspective as a property-owning private citizen - as far as they were concerned property rights were all that mattered. I presume their logic was that they (and others) valued their material status over their political rights.

Now, this sort of thing sounds like balls to me and I think most people of both left and right would scoff at it but I've seen similar things argued (in spirit, if not to the letter) in mainstream conservative stuff in the UK. The Telegraph's assertion that property rights are much more important than human rights for example.

>>There was no question about handguns. A pretty important x:y attitude.

That's one that's region-specific, though. In the UK, it hardly signifies. Almost nobody is for handguns. Judgements on a handgun scale tell you absolutely nothing about political differentiation. It would be like asking 'Likes being poked in the eye with a sharp stick' vs 'Doesn't like being poked in the eye with a sharp stick.'

>That's one that's region-specific, though. In the UK, it hardly signifies. Almost nobody is for handguns. Judgements on a handgun scale tell you absolutely nothing about political differentiation. It would be like asking 'Likes being poked in the eye with a sharp stick' vs 'Doesn't like being poked in the eye with a sharp stick.'


This isn't true. The 'handguns' thing is an issue of civil liberties versus public (and to some extent private) safety: it's a classic "social authortiarian" question.

" In the UK, it hardly signifies."

Well, certainly in the UK there's a huge concensus against private handgun ownership but the political compass is supposed to be nationally non-specific and handgun laws and attitudes to them differ around the world. America has (in)famously liberal firearms laws, many European countries have tighter gun laws that are nonetheless more liberal than those of the UK which are some of the tightest in the world.

It would be interesting to ask Americans for their views on EU membership.

>It would be interesting to ask Americans for their views on EU membership.

Another thing which has nothing to do with either axis on the "compass" graph.

Yes and no.

There may be underlying issues which determine peoples' stance on the EU - or in the US, state vs federal government...or even big vs little government. I imagine there's some degree of correlation with libertarian vs authoritarian.

The left/right correlation would be interesting. There are left and right arguments both for and against the EU...UKIP and No2EU are both against, the European Peoples Party and the Party of European Socialists both for.

Which all just goes to show that the two axes are just *one* view onto the complex, multimensional space in which our opinions lie.

With the proviso that it is, as others have pointed out, only an approximation, Economic Left/Right: -5.62
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -4.41

Some of those questions need something between "disagree" and "agree" because they do not fully define the context within which they are asked.
Nevertheless, I do seem to have scored in the same area as most of your respondents. Are we self selecting??