Posted by Tim Lambert on April 22, 2005 Ken Parish, bored, is asking bloggers to post their scores on the political compass survey. I already have a page where bloggers can do this, but it is a bit unwieldy with 500+ entries. So I thought it would be interesting to do one just for Australian bloggers.
[Go here to see the table and the form.](http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/survey/ozcompass.html)
If you are an Australian blogger and want to add your own result to the table, just take the political compass survey here.
I actually like the yobbos poll, put me very near that party of theirs with the generic name, closer to them then anyone else
the compass poll annoyed me, the question were wrong, and i had no way to enter “this question is badly written”
i’ve entered the compass score though at tim’s
Interesting. I’d almost agree with my placement, except that I suspect I’m slightly closer to centre on the left-right dimension. There were a lot of economic questions that I didn’t have much of an opinion on, but broke left out of habit. It’d be really interesting to see how this turns out, since we’re a self-selected sample of Australian Deltoid-reading bloggers. A hypothesis: the politics of blog-readers are distributed in a roughly normal fashion around the politics of the blogger. So Tim should be near to the middle of us, ignoring floor-effects due to the fact that he’s near the far-libertarian end. (More accurately, I’d suggest it’s a bivariate beta with Tim at the mode, but who really cares about the technicalities?) I wonder how close we’ll get to that.
Hmm. Just looked at the scatterplot for the earlier one. Maybe it doesn’t work that way. Oh well. It was a nice theory for the 20 minutes it lasted
The previous one was widely linked by other bloggers, so it wasn’t just my readers posting their results.
I have done a few of these over the past few years. My view is that they are incredibly subjective. Many conservatives for instance are authoritarian on national security issues but libertarian on moral ones. Many libertarians agree that sex before marriage is immoral, but I suspect the interpretation of that response on the survey would put us in the authoritarian corner. If I wanted, I am sure I could write a survey that would stick Hitler in the centre (I’d include lots of questions about animal welfare issues and social welfare spending) and make Bill Clinton look like an extremist.
Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice! . . . Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. – Barry Goldwater
Joel Parsons says:
I have done a few of these over the past few years. My view is that they are incredibly subjective.
Well, that’s where calibration comes in. If you agree with the results for the contemporary political figures shown on the website, then I’d say that the test is calibrated well enough… for gvmt work. 
I seen a lot of these tables in my time, kid. They are all bullshit.
The only table that matters is the Premiership Ladder. Everything else is bollocks.
“Many libertarians agree that sex before marriage is immoral”
Wow, that’s a new one. I’m a libertarian and I didn’t think *anyone* born in the latter half of the 20th century believed sex before marriage was immoral anymore.
Got a comment saying my results were added to the table, but can’t see it in the table. For the record, my scores were -6.63 Economic, and -5.85 Social.
The way I read Political compass’s graphs (which may well be wrong; I’m not all that literate in these things) it places my somewhere between Nelson Madela and the Dalai Lama. Not at all bad company, if it’s right.
Well, it looks like my “Tim-centric” hypothesis is dead in the water. Tim’s earlier comment gave me some hope for a bit, but no dice, it seems. I guess that’s life for you. Much easier to be wrong than right.
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