Tuesday 30 June 2009

my place on the spectrum

as per julie's suggestion here, i did the political spectrum quiz. this is my result:

My Political Views
I am a left moderate social authoritarian
Left: 6.87, Authoritarian: 1.32

Political Spectrum Quiz

hmmm, i'm only just an "authoritarian" but definitely a lefty. i'm not sure that this really reflects who i am, and i found several of the questions difficult to answer. but there it is.

ETA: didn't have time before this post went up (busy doing the down under feminists carnival!) but wanted to link to this post on tensions between class and democratic reform at kiwipolitico. says what i've been trying to, only better.

7 comments:

DPF:TLDR said...

I know one could spend hours writing about everything wrong with this quiz and not even begin to cover it, but I do wish that they'd come up with a more neutral description than 'authoritarian' for those who believe the state has a strong role in promoting and enforcing moral values.

stargazer said...

yes. thank you. and the questions on immigration really annoyed me too, particularly in the way they were framed.

stargazer said...

actually, thinking about this further, the areas where i wanted the state to have a greater role were around regulation of markets, and regulation of hate speech which incites violence. i don't see that "authoritarian" is a great word to describe someone who wants markets to run fairly! but there you go.

Random Lurker said...

Would you take the quiz at poticalcompass.org and compare the result to this one?

stargazer said...

i'm sure i've done that one before, but i did it again just for you! unfortunately, they don't provide the html code so that i can put the grid up on a blog post in the same way, but my results are quite different from the one in the main post:

Economic Left/Right: -7.38
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -4.67

which makes me a social libertarian, and almost on the same point where nelson mandela sits! i remember that from the last time i did this as well. so there you go.

Random Lurker said...

:-) Thanks for that! It's interesting the difference in the social scale between the two quizzes. Which quiz did you prefer?

stargazer said...

i much preferred the second one, but there were still at least three questions which i answered but wasn't happy with the choices give. there are always hidden assumptions in the questions, and the format doesn't allow any elaboration on whether you agree with the framing. but the second survey had much less of that than the first.