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.
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.