The Most Detailed Ideology Test Ever

I know what I am already - specifically, a traditional Christian Democrat.

So take a look if the test gives the right result, eh?

No, no, no, that Quiz 2 D one is just as bad. It's still misleadingly on two independent axes, there's no "prefer not to answer" option, and you can't rank the importance of the questions. (EDIT: Yes, you can; it's just at the end. My bad.)

And the questions are still bad. For some reason all these quizzes are slanted towards libertarians. Look at that first one: "Should the size of government be reduced?" and there's one option for larger government, one option for the same size of government, and five options for smaller government. The blurbs at the top of each question are also awash in personal bias.

The correct way to phrase that question would be something like "Do you think that government is too large, too small, or about the right size?" with options for much too large, too large, about right, too small, and much too small...

But the only sane answer to any question of that sort is "Spending should be cut if it's for something harmful or unnecessary and kept (or expanded) for something important or necessary." Anyone who makes a blanket statement about all government spending regardless of what it's for does not have a very rational or well-considered opinion.

(The question also fails to distinguish between federal and local governments.)

edited 7th Feb '11 5:29:48 PM by jewelleddragon

That kind of question always irritates me. No, I don't give a shit how big the government is, so long as it's doing a good job, whether that means it needs to be big or small.

And what constitutes "a good job" is entirely situational. I'm happy with the NHS, but I wouldn't impose something similar on the unwilling populace of another country.

I don't really like these tests, they seek to apply a label to you that you should really know already.

I'm a moderate centrist leaning left. The test just confirmed what I already knew, only with an American slant.

edited 7th Feb '11 5:44:45 PM by pagad

I don't care what label they give me, I'm just curious about what result I get from each.

They always seem disappointingly rubbish, though.

edited 7th Feb '11 5:45:44 PM by BobbyG

YOUR SCORE

• Your scored 1 on Moral Order and -3.5 on Moral Rules.
• The following categories best match your score (multiple responses are possible):
• System: Conservatism
• Ideology: Capital Republicanism
• Party: Republican Party
• Presidents: Richard Nixon
• 04' Election: John Kerry, George W. Bush
• 08' Election: John Mc Cain

Of the 661,386 respondents (11,708 on Facebook):

• 5% are close to you.
• 10% are more conservative.
• 12% are more liberal.
• 60% are more socialist.
• 12% are more authoritarian.

Nixon?!? WTF?

edited 7th Feb '11 5:57:40 PM by FrodoGoofballCoTV

On the OP's test it said I was a socialist, which was way off, on The Political Compass it said I was a slightly right-leaning libertarian, which still didn't quite hit the mark, and on the Quiz 2D test, it said I was a "Left-Leaning Freedom Lover", and said that I wanted "substantially less government control of personal activity and somewhat less government control over economic activity", which seems pretty accurate. I think the reason this tests works for me and not some of you other guys is because it seems like he designed this test specifically to find people of this particular political orientation, which covers his views, apparently.

I noticed that too—I got a similar assignation and noticed this blurb at the bottom:

Not happy with the existing parties? Would you like to see a political party that was concerned about freedom and equality? Would you like to shrink big government and big corporations?

I am contemplating starting such a party. This is not a trivial undertaking! However in my manual on how to start a new political party I seriously address the challenges inherent in third party politics in the United States. Third parties generally fail, because the system is rigged against third parties. However, there are a couple of interesting loopholes...

Speck of ulterior motive there, possibly.

I kind of want to design a political test with like 10-15 different choices for each question, to cover subtleties that other tests miss, which is kind of frustrating. And there should be an "I don't know", an "I don't care", and a "None of the Above" choice for everything.

Edit: It should be structured something like a tree: Starting with two branches, "Social" and "Economic", or maybe three - "Social", "Economic", and "Military". For each category it asks you how important that particular set of issues is to you on a scale of one to ten. Then there are going to be sub-categories, like "Sexual Issues", "Drugs", "Censorship", "Surveillance", etc., and you'd have to rate how important each of those categories are. And within each sub-category would be 2-5 questions, such as "What are your views on homosexuality?"

Oh, an no absolutely random questions like whether abstract art should be considered art.

edited 7th Feb '11 6:53:51 PM by OnTheOtherHandle

I was also thinking about what a good politics test would look like (and if it is possible). How would you score it?

I should think that, at the least, there should be a third axis for morality (whether you think it should be in politics, and what role it should play), but even three doesn't seem like very many. The axes also shouldn't all be orthogonal, but I'm not sure how to quantify that.

Problem is, if you have too many axes, all you'll tell people is what boxes they ticked.

Three axes sounds like an improvement, though.

I don't think the abstract art question was random. It's an ideological question. The art world has been tied to politics for some time.

Okay, so we should keep the test country-neutral, first of all, so no asking things like "Should there be more or less government?" since that varies based on what country you're talking about. We have to get them to be very specific, like "What should the government fund?", and let them check off things like "the electricity grid", "education in the form of public schools", "education in the form of vouchers", "the military", "the police", etc. In fact, if we make that list detailed enough that could almost be the entire "Economics" section. The rest of the questions should simply probe the reasons behind why they chose certain things.

As for axes, let's just avoid labels that mean different things based on where you live. So I'm thinking to make it as detailed as possible, we should just dispense with the axes and give a series of scales. There should be a sliding scale on

• how much government control of the economy is acceptable
• how involved they want to be in world politics/foreign affairs
• how much government charity is acceptable
• how much government regulation/surveillance of personal activity is acceptable

Then we could tell them which politicians share their views.

Edit: But Bobby, it's possible to not "get" modern art but still be liberal. (I'm assuming people who answered that it "shouldn't be considered art" would be placed in a more conservative category?) It seems more like personal taste to me.

edited 7th Feb '11 7:07:12 PM by OnTheOtherHandle

If you want to make it non-country-specific, then yes, you'll have to dispense with labels or use strictly qualified labels, since they mean different things in different countries.

You do realize that a series of sliding scales is just axes that aren't graphed against each other (if you had more than three axes, there would be no other way to display them).

There's a difference between "I don't really get this" and "this shouldn't even be considered art", I think.

@Bobby: True, fair enough. But it's still not like they're saying "The government should declare that this is not art!"

@Jewel: Whoops, I Did Not Do The Research there. So basically any political test that doesn't just say "You're X" is going to have axes, then?

Hmm, what if there was a feature for people who are just moving into a new country and want to figure out what party to join? So you have your regular classification, and they can choose the closest party or parties from a number of different countries?

edited 7th Feb '11 8:06:21 PM by OnTheOtherHandle

That last bit sounds interesting. So you could rank people on a lot of scales/axes (potayto, potahto), which itself is not a terribly useful result, particularly if the scales aren't labeled with political designations, but then you could use their rank on the scales to calculate which parties they agree with the most.

Hmm, this might actually be viable. We could come up with the questions together, but I don't know nearly enough math/computer science to actually make the test.

I could write it in VB, but I don't know enough Java Script to make a web-based quiz :P

Still, making an algorithm for it would be interesting. I'm game. A test co-written by lots of people would itself be a great improvement, because it would help eliminate individual biases. (New thread?)

Where would this go, On Topic or Writer's Block? I mean, it's not a story but we're still writing something.

I would say On Topic. That's where political folks mostly hang.

Troper Covens seems like it might be a better fit than Writer's Block, since it'd be a collaborative project.

It's a cool idea.

Is that what happens in Troper Covens? [/hasnoidea]

Anyway, if you start something somewhere else, make sure to put a link here.

If anyone wants to do this, I can handle the coding once the question strategy is figured out.

(Having a ton of axes is fine; just use any correlations you discover between them to determine how many dimensions seem to dominate, then project down onto a cube/plane/line.)

Well, this is rather interesting...

"You desire substantially less government control of economic activity and somewhat less government control over personal activity than is presently the case in the U.S. I used to classify this area as part of 'Moderate Libertarian' but since many libertarians use a more restrict definition of the word 'libertarian' I now use the fuzzier term 'freedom lover' to avoid controversy."

However, the others are right: Such a test should be country-blind. In America, this would describe part of my ethos accurately. I am not an American, hence the oddity.

edited 9th Feb '11 5:58:02 AM by redrosary