I’m not sure how directly relevant this is, but the second sentence suggests that you may be using an idiosyncratic definition of the political spectrum, which may make the rest of this exchange moot. Certainly if you assigned everyone in the US a number based on how liberal or conservative they were, the numbers assigned to the last 3 Democratic presidents would be a lot closer to the left than to the right. By that measure, they were liberal, and that’s how I use it. Not sure what you mean. (I do appreciate that the specific test linked in the OP seems to have an international perspective, and it’s harder to say where these presidents stand vis-à-vis the world, but at any rate, in the political environment in which they operated and were elected they were undoubtedly on the left side of things.)
Because voting for two of them may not have accurately reflected your views, but they more accurately reflected your views than voting for the other guy would have. So if there was some sort of test which purported to show that you were more closely aligned with the Republican candidates in those elections, it would suggest a flawed test, I would think. And if you multiply that by hundreds of elections across the country and over time in which you overwhelmingly find yourself rooting for the candidate of Ideology A over the candidate of Ideology B, that’s a far better test of where your true political ideology is (on balance) than some 61 question test.
I don’t think it necessarily has to invalidate the test, but having found the discrepancy discussed above, I think this may account for it, at least in my case.
That could be true in some small sense. What I’m thinking of is these youthful idealists who are going to overthrow the system and create some idyllic world. As people age they get more perspective and realize that 1) most of these revolutions fail, and 2) most of the ones which succeed go badly askew and diverge from the idealistic views of the movement founders, and frequently do more harm than good. And that ultimately, most of society’s problems ultimately stem from aspects of human nature which are difficult-to-impossible to change. There are exceptions, of course. But on the whole, younger people tend to be overconfident in this area, and tend to lose some of this as they get older.
I agree, but I’d argue that being to the *left *of the *right *does not necessarily say one is “on the left.” And IME, the “center” has moved right over the past 60 years, particularly when it comes to economic positions. But maybe not. Personally, I find it laughable to call Bill or Hillary Clinton “liberal” instead of “centrist.” I’d accept it on spec for Obama, but I think his pro-business stances mitigates that considerably, and he’s hardly the fire-breathing leftist that some on the right (looking at you, talk radio) would paint him.
That’s a fair point. I think you’re not giving sufficient consideration to the relative weight voters might place on specific issues rather than a candidate as a whole. And “the lesser evil” does not necessarily reflect individual political views. We have seen (again, IME) a fairly distinct shift toward more corporatist economic policy over the past several decades; if I end up voting for Hillary it will be despite her policies in that regard, not an endorsement of them.
I get that. But maybe that’s a reflection of your “lesser evil” voting choices. I get that you’ve voted consistently for more conservative candidates, but perhaps you’re at heart more of a John Anderson Republican than a firebrand movement conservative?
I agree entirely. The greatest cynic, in my experience, is a thwarted romantic.
Which is why I’m frankly perplexed at my own continued–and increased–political and social romanticism in recent years.
I didn’t say “left of the right”. I said “closer to the left than to the right”, IOW left of the center.
I would say the opposite. (ISTM that some people who hold to your position – not necessarily you - achieve it by measuring “the left” as “steadily moving further and further to the left”.) On the whole I don’t see where government economic policies have moved to the right over the years.
Me, I agree with 538.com, who said Hillary Clinton Was Liberal. Hillary Clinton Is Liberal.. Bill Clinton is a tougher case, because he was governor of a southern state and went on to face Republican control of congress for 6 of his 8 years in power, making it hard to sort out his natural inclinations from the political reality he dealt with.
I think the weight of the specific issues counts in terms of defining your affiliation with one or another ideology. If the conservative “party line” consists 10 dogmas and you disagree with 9 of them but consistently vote for the more conservative candidate because the other one dogma that you agree with is more important to you than the other 9 combined, then that makes you, on the whole, closer to the conservative ideology than the opposite. It doesn’t make sense to define someone based on percentage of items on a checklist while ignoring the relative weight of the various issues, IMO.
Of course. But it’s impractical to have a separate category and term for the overall political worldview of every individual voter (and also not too important, since what counts in terms of elections and politics is broader groups). As a practical matter, there’s value in sorting people into loosely affiliated imprecise groupings, and that’s what we’re discussing here.
Well I’m in general not a “movement” kind of guy and I pledge allegiance to no one. There are a lot of things that conservatives do that I don’t think much of (e.g. this latest contretemps over the Planned Parenthood videos seems to me – based on what’s been released to date – as much ado about very very little). But in general, I tend to find myself rooting for “the most conservative candidate who can get elected”. (Though my threshold for that may be relatively low – in this election cycle I would prefer Bush. Also, that’s based on the current political spectrum, and if this shifted rightwards to the point where Ted Cruz could get elected I would not start to prefer him on that basis.)
[My first presidential vote was for Ron Paul in 1988, running on the Libertarian ticket. Unfortunately he was crushed by the combined Bush-Dukakis forces. After the Libertarians nominated Howard Stern for Governor of NY, I stopped voting for their candidates.]
The question is wrong … not sure maturity has much to do with peace with the establishment.
Consider the 18-year-old pulling weeds for Ford working half-time at minimum wage. He can’t afford to buy a car. It’s not hard to imagine this person thinking the status quo is wrong, that the Federales should nationalize the car industry and distribute cars equally among all citizens. 30 years later, he worked his way up the career ladder and now he’s pulling down $600,000 a year marketing in Fiji. He’s truly horrified about any change anywhere anytime. Nationalizing the car industry is the worst case for him now.
It’s not a question of maturity, rather of wealth accumulation.
My score is -4.13 econ and -1.59 social which I’d say is roughly accurate.
My answer to the question posed here is Agree. To elaborate upon this answer, in virtually all liberal and probably even in most modern authoritarian (though not totalitarian) societies, gradual and evolutionary reform by working with and within the “Establishment” is preferable to any sort of anti-system efforts at change whether by violence or not. The history of the achievement of political, civil, and socioeconomic reform in the modern West and elsewhere largely bears this out: slavery was abolished by goading the South into rebellion after Lincoln’s election rather than the absentationism of Garrison or the anti-slavery violence of John Brown, the social welfare states of the West were achieved by the electoral victories of centre-left parties and the integration of the labour movement into the “Establishment”, and civil rights for blacks was achieved by the conversion of the northern Democratic Party (while anti-Establishment blacks who rejected the legitimacy of the Republic such as Garvey or the Black Panthers did nothing or even provoked white backlash. The “Establishment”, contrary to the aspirations of the madmen of the Left and the Right is not some monolithic bloc of sadistic lizard Jewmen, but an ever-evolving institution that changes with each generation.
I don’t like this or many of the other questions because they are ambiguous. Yes, a mark of maturity is realizing that one must live in a society and obey laws and customs. So in a sense you do “make peace with the establishment.” But to imply that one should fail to point out injustice and fight the evil just because society says otherwise? No, I don’t agree with that.
Take this one, just as an example:
“If economic globalisation is inevitable, it should primarily serve humanity rather than the interests of trans-national corporations.”
That’s a loaded question. If you take it at face value, I think we all answer “serve humanity.” But what in the hell does that mean? Maybe I don’t see a conflict? Maybe laws which favor these corporations also favor humanity as a whole? Just because I think people are important doesn’t mean I support the implication that I will be in favor of any feel good left wing law proposed under the guise of this vague statement.
Likewise:
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
Sometimes, in some situations, yes. Other times, absolutely not.
Yes. I just took this (Economic Left/Right: -3.75; Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.87 ) and found myself irritated by the wording of many questions. I gather that the intent was to come up with statements that would generate strong agreement or strong disagreement: for example, many people with close to “+10, +10” scores would eagerly agree to #17 (“the rich are too highly taxed”) while people closer to the “-10, -10” corner would strongly DISagree on that one.
But the effort to speak in the voices of the various corners fails in some cases, I think–and I believe that this is because the question-writers backed off from the “characters” they were trying to embody. They didn’t go all-in when impersonating the corner people: +10,+10 folks, or the -10, -10 folks.
My theory is that this could be remedied by making each question more clearly the product of a corner-person’s voice. Case in point: This thread’s topic, #50 (“Making peace with the establishment is an important aspect of maturity”), could have been a better gauge if it had been more like one of these:
Making peace with the establishment is the only sensible policy for intelligent people.
or
‘Making peace with the establishment’ is how people label, and excuse, selling out.
These options remove the “stages of life” element from the question; that element adds to the ambiguity of the question-as-it-stands because we’ve all observed that people DO change their views on The Establishment as they move through life. And our powers of observation of the various stages of life isn’t really what the Compass is trying to measure. In this question, presumably, the Compass is trying to measure the degree to which we believe that conforming to the status quo is a smart or sensible or even admirable thing to do…the “our time of life influences our views” aspect shouldn’t come into it.
For the first statement, most people in the (-, -) quadrant would clearly disagree, and most in the (+, +) quadrant would agree. For the second statement, these would be reversed.
In short: Many of the more ambiguous questions in the list of 61 could be improved (and become better contributors to the assessment of the test-taker’s position on the coordinate plane) if they were to be re-worded so that the Voices of the Corners were better represented.
A young rebel and an old sage may hold each other’s views in contempt, but neither of them is right or wrong. I think diachronically people do make peace with the establishment.
I have taken the test twice. The site had just been launched when I tried it the first time. About five years later, I was curious to see whether or not there was going to be a significant difference in my general political stance. There wasn’t. Again I was standing on the vertical axis between left and right, leaning slightly toward Libertarian. I guess maturity comes with not only making peace with the establishment but also attitude sclerosis.
In his youth, my father enjoyed the benefits of the communist revolution offered by the Red Army occupying most Eastern Europe. About fifty years later I participated in the anti-communist revolution only to witness the establishment of an even more corrupt regime.
Acceptance of the establishment enables people to move/advance freely within the system. Also, by accepting the establishment, people can make the best of their resources when it comes to reaching their individual goals. Thus, maturity equates with a time when people focus on pursuing their careers and protecting their families, although they may be still disatisfied or bitter in their hearts. A mature person is simply more practical and less idealistic than an immature one.
One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
Most of the 61 questions contain terms that are ambiguous; nothing is defined. But that wouldn’t keep the test from being valid–that is, even in the absence of clearly-defined terms, the test may accurately measure what it’s designed to measure (one’s position on the coordinate plane as determined by left versus right economic views on the horizontal axis, and authoritarian versus libertarian views on the vertical axis).
I don’t know how well the test’s validity has been studied. It may be that it has less predictive power (for one’s position on the two axes) than it might have, if some questions were re-worded.
But the re-wording wouldn’t necessarily have to include clear definitions of the terms used. It could be that people consistently define the terms according to their position on the grid, and if so, the lack of clear definitions wouldn’t detract from the test’s validity.
There are some things so manifestly stupid and unjust, and the obstacles to making meaningful change so insurmountable that it makes me less mature politically than my younger self.
hmmm… I’m not sure about that. It sounded to me like one of their goals was to generate conversation about the issues, so I think the questions were deliberately ambiguous to serve as a sort of Rorschach test for a person’s attitudes about authority, money, etc. But as a centrist, I think it would have been helpful to have the additional options of “slightly agree” and “slightly disagree” to differentiate between things I actually agree with and things I just clicked on because they wouldn’t let me sit on the fence. I took the test a couple of days ago and got (-2.something,-1.something); but I wanted the exact values, so I took the test again and got (-2.38,+0.26) - and I don’t think I’ve radically altered my views in the last 48 hours. But then, maybe +1 and -1 people agree with each other more than 8 and 10 people.
Again, I’m not sure. I think watchwolf49’s 18-year-old weedpuller is perfectly capable of embracing The System if he has a reason to believe his hard work will ultimately be rewarded - I’d call that maturity. Similarly, if the 48-year-old marketing exec whines about paying taxes so weedpullers without rich families can have a chance of going to college and improving their lives, I’d say that was immature (unless he was my boss, in which case I’d avoid talking to him more than necessary and tell co-workers how bewildering it is that an otherwise astute investor could overlook the obvious economic benefits of an enlarged applicant pool).
Sorry about the delay in answering; in recent days I haven’t been able to get to this site much and didn’t see your post.
In re the idea of adding “slightly agree/disagree” options: I’d suspect that doing so would add to the validity of the Compass. Of course there’s no way to rule out the possibility that some respondents are simply constitutionally more in the habit of ‘hedging’–clicking the “slightly” or “somewhat” options far more often than the extremes of “agree” or “disagree,” no matter what the topic. But since most Likert-style scales do include the “somewhat” options (typically with five choices per question, such as “disagree, somewhat disagree, neutral, somewhat agree, agree”), inclusion of those options might might serve to make test-takers more at ease.
About the age differences: of course the discussion of how a given 18-year-old might respond to the Establishment question, as compared with how a given 48-year-old might respond, differs fundamentally from the discussion of how a given 18-year-old might change his or her views over the course of 30 years. That’s probably an entire thread, right there. ^_~