Oz Political Compass

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.

Political Compass graph

Tags

More like this

Seems that bloggers have a strong urge to post their scores for Bryan Caplan's Libertarian Purity Test. So here's a spot where you can post your score and find blogs with similar (or different) scores. [Go here to see the table and the form.](http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin…
This post is a way for me to keep track of which blogs have blogrolled me. If you have a blog and have had the good taste to blogroll me, you can add your blog here. [Go here to see the table and the form.](http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/survey/backlink.html)
Via Jim Henley comes a test to see how nerdy you are. Like my previous quiz pages, you can post your score here and a link to your blog here. [Go here to see the table and the form.](http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/survey/nerd.html)
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) attempts to classify each pesonality into one of 16 types described by the four letter codes in the table below. TypeLogic has descriptions of all the types, as well as a FAQ. You can find your out own type in this on-line test. If you have a…

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

Dan Navarro: agreed. If there had been a neutral position available, I suspect I would have sneaked over to the Right hand side of the economic line.

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.

Bugger!

I've entered my score without minus signs. I should be on the opposite side of the graph.

Sorry, Tim. Would you correct for me?

"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.

Have they changed the test at politicalcompass.org or am I just feeling more certain (less thoughtful?) now? I remember having to think about more questions last time I did that test.

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.