My Political Views
I am a right social libertarian
Right: 6.94, Libertarian: 6.94
Political Spectrum Quiz
I found this via Comrade Misfit, who is an interesting Left Libertarian, just about the same place only in the lower left quadrant. This is a very interesting quiz, with a very interesting methodology. Not only can you do the typical strongly disagree .. strongly agree range, there's also a how much of a giveadamn do I give range for each of the 50 questions. It may be that some of the less rightish and less libertarian questions had moderately low giveadamn scores.
For example, I strongly agree that Gay Marriage shouldn't be banned. I'm middle of the road in how much I care. That probably left my overall score more rightish than I really am. Also, some of the things that probably drove my score rightwards are actually what I see as principles of the Left. For example, I think that government services should only be offered in English, to encourage assimilation. Assimilation tends to strengthen community feelings (and conversely balkanization destroys those feelings), and that it's really important for a society to have a healthy sense of community or it really will degenerate into a sauve qui peut anarchy. However, I suspect those weren't scored as leftie points.
And there's added detail that does show this:
My Foreign Policy Views
Score: -3.73
Political Spectrum Quiz
My Culture War Stance
Score: -1.02
Political Spectrum Quiz
But other than these couple of nits about the algorithm, this isn't bad at all.
It's kinda fun to retake that one on a yearly basis to see if you've changed. When I first started blogging I was about where you are but as time goes by it's been drifting left. I think it's because my "Give-a-damn o-meter" is going down.
ReplyDeletemy dear friend. You should remain in the shadows. Coming out like this will qualify you for the kind of hate mail I get! ha ha ha ha . big fan!
ReplyDeleteEvidently I am exactly middle of the road with a tendency to authoritarianism. My kids would agree with the second part.
ReplyDeleteTacitus
I'm in the same quadrant as you, but about half-way back towards the center. I think it's because I ended up checking 'no important' on about 75% of the questions...
ReplyDeleteMy score: You are a right moderate social libertarian.
ReplyDeleteRight: 6.56, Libertarian: 3.18
Small l is how I've described myself for years.
BP, you bigot.....there's some hatemail for you!!
ReplyDeleteI agree with your assessment of the tool as a bit off - for instance on the foreign policy set the statement "On the right side are those who want a strong military that intervenes around the world." doesn't adequately cover those, like me, who want a strong military which DOESN'T get used to intervene around the world...
My Score:
You are a right social moderate.
Right: 4.19, Libertarian: 0.46
Right and libertarian here as well, and as someone else said I find I care about many of these things much less than I used to. And many of my right-leanings support my left-leanings. The example I gave on Facebook was that I strongly agree the importance of marriage to society should be celebrated...and it is one reason I firmly support marriage equality.
ReplyDeleteA number of the statements in that survey are loaded, as Sabra and Differ have pointed out. They seem to assume that if you agree, it's for a single reason.
ReplyDeleteWhat throws off a lot of people though is that pollsters don't care. They're not required to understand the issues behind the poll, just to collect useful statistics. For example, a place where I used to work required every employee to fill out the annual employee engagement survey. It was, among other things, a way for the company to gauge job satisfaction. (Probably because higher satisfaction meant they didn't have to spend as much to keep good people.)
One item on the survey used to cause arguments among the engineers and their managers though. The statement was, "Agree or disagree: I have a best friend at work." Some engineers interpreted it as "my best friend anywhere is at work" while others read it as "there is a person at work who is more of a friend to me than anyone else there." We all agreed it was poorly worded, and should not be on the survey.
But one of the managers asked the pollsters about it, and they said that their research showed a very strong correlation between the response to that statement as it was worded and the productivity of the team , department, or company. They had tested variations of the statement versus productivity measures as they developed the survey, and that wording gave the most accurate result.
Which surprised the heck out of us, considering how may hours we wasted arguing about it.
More on that psychometric scaling -- there are some nice graphs there that show one being to the windward or leeward of a center-point -- but that center point is probably arbitrary. It is possibly a mean of responses to some 0.8 trial version of the survey, but it could just be what a researcher thought was the most neutral point based upon his own perspective. The meat is in the response differences -- you can compare your result with another persons and say OK you are more "x" than me, or "I am now more "x" than I was two years ago".
ReplyDeleteThe addition of the "care" scale to weight the different scales in putting your one mark on the overall compass is a useful innovation.
Hmm. "You are a right social libertarian. Right: 7.1, Libertarian: 6.23"
ReplyDeleteProbably due to my strong position on abortion canceling out my strong position on marriage equality, more than anything else. Plus the same issues Differ, Sabra, et al. pointed out.
I do like the addition of the "how much do you actually care" scale, though.
Right: 7.31, Libertarian: 0.61 here.
ReplyDeleteDave H and others are right though some of those questions are very loaded. Phrased one way I could be absolutely for them phrased another I would be absolutely against them.
OOOH and it looks like I am teh most right of those reported. So of course we know what that makes everyone else? The opposite of right... Wrong. :)
OK, I got Right: 7.68 and Libertarian: 8.4, with a Non-interventionist of -6.9 and Cultural Liberal of -3.06. I'm guessing that my opposition to stealing money from some people to give to others got me that strong "Right" score. (R.K., there's always someone faster, stronger, or sneakier.)
ReplyDelete@Chris Yeah, but there was too much of a set up. If I hadn't gone there someone else would have.
ReplyDeleteFor the record my NI and CL scores were 1.93 and 3.38 respectively. Gotta love how it charts things from Hippy to Neo-con since I am Classical liberal and PaleoCon
I took that quiz in college 20 something years ago. I bet the prof I could get the little pegged dead center. He didn't think it was possible. I won the bet and got an A.
ReplyDeleteI am a right moderate social libertarian.
ReplyDeleteWhatever that means.
Apparently I'm an evil Neo Con, and a social Neanderthal even though some of my answers are similar to what you said.
I don't get it.