Let's make a politics/ideology test

So it's been done. You know, what I wonder is how do we assign the political philosophies to these axes. They there probably had members of all of these parties questioned. If we have two axes it's as simple as assign authoritarian/libertarian/Left/Right to corners, but here we'll need more of it.

Oh yeah, one of those blob graphs would be quite good.

Then if we find strong correlations between some of the axes later we can take the superfluous ones out.

edited 10th Feb '11 2:52:11 PM by BlackHumor

We could have the question "I am batshit insane and/or unreasonable" and Agree and Strongly Agree could give multipliers to your final score

Really though, the problem I have with most tests is that they almost entirely focus on economic policy and a few (often rather loaded) questions about one or two hot-button issues. Furthermore, there's also a big difference between personal feelings on a matter, and feelings on interventionist public policy regarding the same — I don't think I've ever seen a test make that distinction.

Gloomer: That's a great idea. If we did that, we wouldn't have binary axes, but single values—ie, it wouldn't measure whether you are more individualist or statist, it would just be a single measurement of how individualist you are.

So do people want to do that instead of binary axes? If so, we should be thinking of single values we can evaluate, rather than pairs of values.

Py: That's bothered me too. Hopefully our quiz will be a chance to correct that issue.

edited 10th Feb '11 3:32:59 PM by jewelleddragon

I doubt that there will ever be a truly satisfying scale that allows one to determine categorically one's political orientation. Political beliefs are too individual.

So, how do we decide which axes we're going to use?

The two ways I can see are making a crowner to directly determine the axes, or else starting a topic to ask people a bunch of political questions and seeing if we can tease the most important patterns out of that.

I was going to make a crowner, except I have no idea how to make crowners. Anyone else want to get one started? I'll help populate it.

One of the difficulties with the asking-questions method is that the questions you ask are inevitably going to be based on what you think is important—that is, the axes you would implicitly use—so it's likely to be begging the question.

edited 18th Feb '11 8:56:35 PM by jewelleddragon

So, how do we decide which axes we're going to use?

Is there a way we can actually use a unit of axes or hatchets to symbolize the axises.

I can create a crowner once you decide what form you want it to take.

("Axes" is the correct plural, yes.)

Here's a crowner.

Go and populate it, and I'll go holler a mod to get it attached to this topic.

You want a Sandbox crowner; we can't attach Essential ones.

Right then, here you go.

I made the old one from the crowner index, which didn't seem to have sandbox on it. Might've just missed it, though.

Hey guys, look what I found!

Google apparently has a chart API.

I've added a couple of items.

A few of my ideas:

• An axis for individual authority. (different from civil liberty, in that this judges how much an individual should be able to affect the government.)
• An option that allows one to decide how much importance they place on an axis. (I'm not sure what this would entail, but it is of interest to me.)
• Additional broad reaching questions on ethics, such as "I believe that the individual should be required to sacrifice themselves for others", and so on.

Question: the hell is "Economic Mobility"?

I'm trying to put in descriptions for some of these, but I'm having a bit of trouble figuring some out myself.

If the people who added these originally could help, that would be great.

I've expanded and elaborated a bit.

edited 19th Feb '11 6:28:38 PM by TheMightyAnonym

Could the person who added Government Authority please clarify one thing?

This is mostly an America-specific question, but it's quite key:

Are you talking about centralized, federal government control vs. local/state-level government control (state's rights), or are you talking about more vs. less government control on all levels?

My guess would be all levels.

Shouldn't the axes be based around ideology rather than actual programs to promote?

edited 20th Feb '11 12:08:17 AM by Deboss

You mean there's a difference?

Also, I think the Radar Chart would be best for this. The "Importance" coordinate can be added as a third dimension.

Several of them mention actions as supporting the ideology, which seems restrictive to me. Why someone supports an action is more important to an ideology than the action itself.

About the "how important is each axis" measure:

One way to measure this would be to vary the total length of each axis. For instance, if (as an example) we had a morality axis and a civil liberties axis, and you cared a lot about the civil liberties axis and not much at all about the morality axis, the civil liberties axis might be twice as long as the morality axis.

This would effectively place you closer to the middle on scales you don't care much about, which seems right.

I'd agree there.

We need to figure out which axes encompass which, or something to that extent.

I'm noticing so far there are very few down votes.

Is this because everyone goes "yay that's a good idea" on everything, or is it the problem I've seen other boards where crowners aren't used frequently where people just feel uncomfortable downvoting stuff?

It's that there is no rational reason to downvote most of the items.

I've only downvoted a couple, and upvoted ones I'm sure about. Ones that I'm neutral on, I leave.

More often than not, it's neutral.