Those sorts of questions aren’t bad ideas but I’ve become fairly confident that that quiz is designed to recruit more libertarians, not accurately place anyone’s political views. This is a better, though longer, political view quiz.
Strongly disagree on Political Compass being better. The questions are heavily loaded, the very first question being
If economic globalisation is inevitable, it should primarily serve humanity rather than the interests of trans-national corporations.
and many questions such as
Astrology accurately explains many things.
aren’t at all about what should be done or what should be the state of things. What are you going to infer about my political beliefs based on my answer to that?
Questions are loaded in different directions (in comparison to the World’s Smallest where all the questions are loaded in the libertarian direction) so the results balance each other out. Admittedly there are some questions that I wouldn’t immediately think would indicate anything about my political beliefs but its seems to accurately place people- at least those I’ve talked to. Have you taken it and felt that your placement was wrong?
I have no doubt we could come up with a quiz better than either of these if we wanted to put in the time.
The Political Compass seems to me, based on my own and friends’ experiences to have a strong pressure towards the lower left corner. As one of them said, “you would have to want to sacrifice babies to corporations to end up in the upper right corner.”
The World’s Smallest Political Quiz isn’t entirely neutral, but to me it would seem to spread people much more evenly, and importantly all questions are clearly on the two axis along which it measures political stance.
Pressure in that direction is definitely possible given that thats where most of my friends think they belong anyway. Though its strange then that they place the entire American political spectrum in the upper right. I’ll reconsider my position on it.
But the World’s Smallest isn’t a suitable alternative. Its just packed with weasel words and its going to obscure a lot of differences just because a lot of people are going to answer “Maybe sometimes” even if they lean heavily in one direction or the other. Also, the fact that this community is probably skewed libertarian anyway is just going to make it harder to interpret the results. The last thing we need is a poll that will automatically confirm our assumptions about this group’s political views.
Although it is designed as part of libertarian recruitment and is used to start discussions with people about freedoms they already support and then “draw them in” by gradually exposing them to other ideas, the reality of the data is that not many people score libertarian (the Web data isn’t very accurate because you get a lot more libertarians visiting the site).
In my younger years I did some tabling for the Libertarian Party, giving the quiz, letting them place a dot on a blow up of the quiz grid to let them mark how they scored and compare with others. And I have to say, in all that time, I did not encounter one person out of several hundred that scored libertarian who was not already a card-carrying member. In fact, if anything, most people score down in the authoritarian range.
This is just the data set I’ve collected, though. Maybe there is a better one out there than the one you can find from the online version of the quiz.
Maybe. But they did a version that was less obviously biased through an actual polling firm and got these results which represent libertarians as eight times more common than the number of people who identify as libertarian. Now maybe there really are those kinds of sympathies for the libertarian position, I’m not sure. But it doesn’t give me a lot of confidence since the one online is worse.
But even if it doesn’t skew libertarian it still lumps way to many people as centrist for it to be particularly useful. And any test that labels people as “authoritarian” (something usually reserved for totalitarian regimes) is pretty ridiculous.
Those sorts of questions aren’t bad ideas but I’ve become fairly confident that that quiz is designed to recruit more libertarians, not accurately place anyone’s political views. This is a better, though longer, political view quiz.
Strongly disagree on Political Compass being better. The questions are heavily loaded, the very first question being
and many questions such as
aren’t at all about what should be done or what should be the state of things. What are you going to infer about my political beliefs based on my answer to that?
(Edited to fix formatting.)
Questions are loaded in different directions (in comparison to the World’s Smallest where all the questions are loaded in the libertarian direction) so the results balance each other out. Admittedly there are some questions that I wouldn’t immediately think would indicate anything about my political beliefs but its seems to accurately place people- at least those I’ve talked to. Have you taken it and felt that your placement was wrong?
I have no doubt we could come up with a quiz better than either of these if we wanted to put in the time.
The Political Compass seems to me, based on my own and friends’ experiences to have a strong pressure towards the lower left corner. As one of them said, “you would have to want to sacrifice babies to corporations to end up in the upper right corner.”
The World’s Smallest Political Quiz isn’t entirely neutral, but to me it would seem to spread people much more evenly, and importantly all questions are clearly on the two axis along which it measures political stance.
Pressure in that direction is definitely possible given that thats where most of my friends think they belong anyway. Though its strange then that they place the entire American political spectrum in the upper right. I’ll reconsider my position on it.
But the World’s Smallest isn’t a suitable alternative. Its just packed with weasel words and its going to obscure a lot of differences just because a lot of people are going to answer “Maybe sometimes” even if they lean heavily in one direction or the other. Also, the fact that this community is probably skewed libertarian anyway is just going to make it harder to interpret the results. The last thing we need is a poll that will automatically confirm our assumptions about this group’s political views.
Although it is designed as part of libertarian recruitment and is used to start discussions with people about freedoms they already support and then “draw them in” by gradually exposing them to other ideas, the reality of the data is that not many people score libertarian (the Web data isn’t very accurate because you get a lot more libertarians visiting the site).
In my younger years I did some tabling for the Libertarian Party, giving the quiz, letting them place a dot on a blow up of the quiz grid to let them mark how they scored and compare with others. And I have to say, in all that time, I did not encounter one person out of several hundred that scored libertarian who was not already a card-carrying member. In fact, if anything, most people score down in the authoritarian range.
This is just the data set I’ve collected, though. Maybe there is a better one out there than the one you can find from the online version of the quiz.
Maybe. But they did a version that was less obviously biased through an actual polling firm and got these results which represent libertarians as eight times more common than the number of people who identify as libertarian. Now maybe there really are those kinds of sympathies for the libertarian position, I’m not sure. But it doesn’t give me a lot of confidence since the one online is worse.
But even if it doesn’t skew libertarian it still lumps way to many people as centrist for it to be particularly useful. And any test that labels people as “authoritarian” (something usually reserved for totalitarian regimes) is pretty ridiculous.